Working for a successful automotive supplier doesn’t always mean you’re part of a large organization. To exist and compete at a global level, the key to winning new opportunities is to ensure your engineering team is fully supported and empowered to communicate, collaborate, and design with innovation as their mantra.
Engineers are most innovative when they have the freedom to design something cool. But an engineer’s job is not just about personal aspiration. They must also serve the greater business good by supporting business growth, profitability and delivering designs that beat the competition. Did we mention satisfying customer requirements?
As an engineer, it’s not about the limitations of the mind, it’s the impedance of slow technology and un-integrated processes that constrain the capacity for innovation to flow and flourish within the supply chain. It also impacts your capacity to successfully win new bids.
Today’s Collaboration Challenges for Engineering
The expansion of the global supply chain has opened up a new realm of connectivity for design engineers around the world. However without an interactive and intuitive platform, true collaboration is hindered by a variety of legacy processes and tools that take too long to collect data and, by the time made available to the supply chain, is out of date.
Social media (and associated applications) has become a digital conduit in our personal lives that shapes how we communicate, share information and collaborate with friends and family. As engineers constantly strive to go beyond traditional 3D CAD, they expect to incorporate the same digital and social capability into the product development and design process.
So how do we apply the same social, instinctive & inclusive influence we experience with Facebook and Twitter to the engineering world?
Engineers CAN adopt the ingenuity of social media with solutions that drive global collaboration, enhance existing modeling capabilities and integrate product design processes. The challenges can be broken down into 3 categories: Social, Instinctive and Inclusive.
Social:
Building a consolidated view of a product’s development status requires the synchronization of data from multiple systems and the input from many people. This takes a long time and often the information is already out of date by the time it is made available to the enterprise.
The key is to leverage all data and product information in the correct engineering context, version, and configuration. To accomplish this requires a single source of all product data that delivers accurate and up to date information, in real-time, 24/7.
Instinctive:
Legacy processes and tools are old, difficult to use and provide an overload of obsolete data. Individual and local teams also create their own flexible working processes that aren’t shared or adopted by the entire enterprise.
Engineers today need powerful tools and processes that are geographically distributed across their extended enterprise and encompass suppliers and partners. The challenge is to utilize integrated 3D processes throughout the entire product creation process – from conceptual product definition to geometry definition, behavior modeling and simulation.
Inclusive:
Today, the use of 3D data in product definition is commonplace with a huge explosion in the amount of information that has to be managed. Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to find accurate data quickly and easily and in the right context for the task at hand.
Leading organizations are now demanding better, faster and easier ways to harness 3D data to drive their next generation business processes. In order to exceed and manage existing design capabilities, engineers need the ability to leverage new supplemental engineering processes that drive business value.
How Can Automotive Suppliers Compete Successfully and Efficiently?
Many solutions are available to connect product design functionality at a global level, but few go beyond traditional 3D CAD & PDM to offer a unique ability to unify global projects and support engineering processes and product innovation. Dassault Systèmes’ Bid to Win 3DEXPERIENCE® solutions integrate the capabilities required to manage, share and simulate products. Industry-proven tools and processes enable your teams to analyze opportunities, win optimal new business, then design, engineer, simulate, manufacture, and deliver on target to your customers’ satisfaction.
Engineering Excellence
Discover solutions that apply the same social, instinctive and inclusive capabilities of social media. Watch the three-part CATIA Engineering Excellence webinar series to see how you can achieve engineering excellence and the freedom to design, including:
- A SOCIAL design environment built on a single source of truth accessible through powerful 3D dashboards that drive business intelligence, real-time concurrent design and collaboration across all stakeholders.
- An INSTINCTIVE 3DEXPERIENCE with world class 3D modeling capabilities to enhance existing design activities.
- An INCLUSIVE product development platform, easily integrated with existing processes & tools enabling everyone to participate in the product design process.
Watch the three-part CATIA Engineering Excellence webinar series
