Dassault Systemes, IBM announce PLM Portfolio V5R17

By Plant Engineering Staff September 26, 2006

Dassault Systemes and IBM released Version 5, Release 17 of their Product Lifecycle Management portfolio, comprised of CATIA for collaborative product development, ENOVIA VPLM and ENOVIA SmarTeam for collaborative lifecycle management. Dassault Systemes also announced DELMIA V5R17 for virtual production and its V5R17 PLM sourcing solutions (Collaborative Enterprise Sourcing – CES) for ENOVIA VPLM.

V5R17 reportedly leverages DS and IBM’s PLM strategy for business process optimization, value chain innovation, engineering to manufacturing cycle streamlining, intellectual capital growth and standards adoption.

“V5R17’s unique virtual community enables integration between stakeholders in the product development chain, facilitating the reuse and sharing of knowledge,” said Dominique Florack, executive vice-president, Strategy and R&D at Dassault Systemes. “V5R17 extends V5 openness, offering major XML enhancements through its combined 3DXML and web services strategy, for large deployments in our customers’ ecosystems.”

Walter Donaldson, general manager, Product Lifecycle Management, IBM, said, “Leveraging product information to align product development processes with business strategy is a key challenge for our customers. V5R17 reinforces our ability to help customers grow their businesses by deploying innovative solutions that drive efficiency, productivity and overall success in the marketplace.”

“We recognize that DELMIA has introduced a paradigm shift with the latest release. As a Body-in-White planner, the new possibilities in resource and layout planning are very interesting for me. With these, DELMIA closes the loop between early product evaluation and process planning – where we already use DELMIA in production – and resource oriented capacity planning, in context, with the manufacturing layout. With selected suppliers, we are currently evaluating the benefits that we would get in deploying the new release,” said Holger Schanz, Teamleader Digital Body-in-White Planning DaimlerChrysler.

Designed to significantly reduce overall manufacturing process time, CATIA V5R17 includes enhancements in 3D electrical harness flattening, and increased efficiency of NC programming and simulation. New core styling enhancements allow for rapid exploration of design ideas while permitting last-minute styling modifications. Design productivity is significantly improved with a breakthrough auto-filleting capability that enables automotive powertrain and chassis designers to dramatically save time.

ENOVIA’s key enhancements in the VPM Navigator and in the VPLM/SmarTeam reconciliation capabilities foster relational design and concurrent working across the extended enterprise. CATIA V5R17 extends the 3D master approach with new capabilities, enabling the fast and convenient display of tolerances and annotations in a familiar drawing layout within the 3D environment. The 3D XML now includes automation support, finite elements analysis (FEA) results and materials rendering.

In V5R17, Collaborative Enterprise Sourcing combines engineering and sourcing functions into one collaborative desktop environment, enabling design for supply, parts reuse and obsolescence management early on and throughout the product lifecycle. The new release enhances versioning and embeds advanced configuration management in VPM Navigator, dramatically improving designer productivity.

V5R17’s ad-hoc review and dynamic approval capabilities provide more flexible business process support, allowing an organization to respond more rapidly to the demands of global collaboration and competition. Broader utilization and proliferation of 3D XML data leverages and extends the power of 3D beyond engineering communities.

ENOVIA SmarTeam V5R17 adds breakthrough flexibility to product structure management, significantly accelerating engineering processes across disciplines. V5R17’s CATIA V5 integration and reconciliation deliver greater robustness, optimizing design collaboration and OEM-supplier interaction. With a newly designed Web user interface that optimizes the user experience, V5R17 extends collaborative benefits to remote users. Enriched support for digital mock-up, 3D XML and security enhancements further foster enterprise knowledge-sharing and decision-making. Latest CAD certifications maximize collaborative engineering scenarios for multi-CAD organizations.

DELMIA V5R17 introduced the V5-based Product Process and Resource family of products for unified V5 access on the product, process and resources stored in the Manufacturing Hub. This allows DELMIA users to navigate and author manufacturing information in the context of the product definition and under lifecycle and configuration control. V5R17 boosts productivity in the body-in-white automotive process for OEMs and their suppliers, with concurrent process planning, integrated Gantt charts, and intuitive assembly line resources management. V5R17 leverages the design engineer’s specifications to automatically generate detailed shop floor instructions, significantly reducing authoring time, eliminating errors and improving accuracy. With V5R17, DELMIA is delivering highly focused solutions for the small and medium-sized enterprise in Work Instruction Authoring and Human Task Simulation and Analysis, optimizing return on investment. Process coverage is broadened through new CAA applications in the domains of robotic coatings, inspection, off-line and on-line programming and integration with Manufacturing Execution Systems.