People often ask me, in my capacity as senior director of growth initiatives for SIMULIA, why Dassault Systèmes bundles its software offerings into “industry experience” packages. Why focus so closely on individual industry categories such as aerospace, life sciences, automotive and so on?
The answer is all about making our products more accessible to the people who use them.
In many ways, the digitization of information has made things easier. Yet in other respects it has meant more complexity. We essentially started out decades ago with a single, general purpose product. Abaqus software could be employed by engineers to solve challenges in a variety of different industries. This approach was quite successful, and our customers began asking for more products as well, in order to make simulation a part of their core business processes.
And, as the reach of the SIMULIA/Dassault Systèmes software portfolio grew, and our customers became able to accomplish so many new tasks, we realized that they might prefer to focus on the pieces of the overall portfolio that were most applicable to them. As the software has become more interactive, the power it can deliver to the user’s hands—and imagination—has become both impressive and a bit daunting. How do you pick the tools that are optimum for the work you want to do?
Industries actually have many common practices and needs that span the range of customers within each field. We decided to organize our customer requirements by industry because it enabled us to collect, identify and share those “best practices” that are truly applicable to any company that operates within a given industry.
And best practices are the key to effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. With so much maturity in our product, for any given problem there can be half a dozen different ways to solve it. So we try to help our customers figure out which of those ways are going to be most efficient for them—something that is not always that obvious. We can help people avoid a trial-and-error approach and save them a great deal of effort.
We have available a set of industry-specific demonstration packages that show what are the best combinations of features, functions and methods that will solve common problems most efficiently. We know what we’re talking about—we have knowledge accumulated over many years and honed into deep expertise that we are ready to share with you.
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As an example, we work with quite a few customers who are making medical devices. We’ve seen how the various stent makers approach their product requirements and we can share with them the methods we’ve learned over the years in terms of how to solve these very, very difficult problems. There are complex materials involved, complex loading—and yet everyone encounters the same simulation challenges. What makes each company’s stent design unique is its individual geometry. While respecting IP, which is paramount, we help them understand how to simulate a stent interfacing with an accurate representation of soft tissue, something that can be a very challenging proposition. We create generic examples from scratch that demonstrate methodologies, but don’t incorporate any proprietary information.
This is the first part of a two part series about how we, at Dassault Systèmes, make our products more accessible to our users by sharing many common best practices across industries. Stay tuned for the second part of this series where I discuss the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its revolutionary ease-of-use for all industries.
