PLM solutions power industrial equipment manufacturers

Design and manufacturing of modern industrial products is inherently complex. As product variation increases and suppliers assume greater design and manufacturing responsibility, estimating total production costs becomes more difficult. Yet companies must meet customer demands and protect profit margins – especially difficult challenges in a slow economy.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a proven strategy for thriving in tough markets, making companies more effective, innovative and successful around the globe. Better yet, powerful Dassault Systèmes (DS) PLM solutions – including CATIA for virtual product design, DELMIA for virtual production, ENOVIA for global collaborative lifecycle management, SIMULIA for virtual testing, 3DVIA for online lifelike experience, and Exalead for structured and unstructured data search – are now available to companies of all sizes.

With PLM solutions, companies can be more successful at all stages of the industrial equipment industry: bidding, design and engineering, manufacturing and assembly, and implementation and maintenance.

Improved Bidding

The best bid addresses customer requirements, ensures product quality and protects profit margins by anticipating and addressing key challenges more effectively than the competition. The more detailed your bid, the more confidence customers have in your promise.

With PLM solutions, companies can be more successful competing at all stages of the industrial equipment industry: bidding, design and engineering, manufacturing and assembly, and implementation and maintenance.

The DS PLM solution for Industrial Equipment helps to quickly create and manage more concept variants by reusing intellectual property. Templates and catalogs make CAD data, bills of material (BOMs), and simulation results readily available for developing and comparing multiple configurations quickly, accurately and inexpensively, and helps ensure accurate pricing. Communication using lifelike animated 3D models quickly demonstrates that a product meets customer expectations and can be produced as bid.

PLM also improves collaboration, helping to refine concepts faster with fewer late-cycle glitches. The bottom line: faster, more detailed concept modeling empowered by fully informed stakeholders with realtime access to product development information. PLM allows companies to standardize methods, react to global demand and accurately assess requirements and costs before bidding, delivering more confidence in a project’s manufacturability and profitability.

Design Excellence

Product complexity can contribute to design inconsistencies, delays and poor quality that erode margins and customer satisfaction. DS PLM facilitates design and engineering collaboration and task coordination, increasing the accuracy of new designs or product variants. Intelligent design templates help standardize parts to better leverage purchasing power.

DS PLM facilitates design and engineering collaboration and task coordination, increasing the accuracy of new designs or product variants.

Decreased design time and complexity improve manufacturability, profitability and the ability to meet the safety and regulatory requirements of each customer, no matter where they are in the world. DS PLM also efficiently handles the large assemblies typical of the industrial equipment industry, with powerful kinematics to detect clashes, tolerancing to help lower the price of components, and fully integrated, industry-specific solutions from hundreds of software development partners to meet specialized needs.

DS PLM provides an integrated system for design, analysis and manufacturing to support smooth transitions from 2D to 3D, and from design to analysis and tooling. The DS simulation portfolio encompasses finite element methods and advanced non-linear analysis. By enabling collaboration between designers and analysis engineers, DS PLM accelerates performance-based design decisions and reduces the need for costly and time-consuming physical prototypes and testing. And with strong systems engineering tools, systems engineers can design, collaborate across multidiscipline teams, and validate their model-based embedded systems applications, including control software, electrical / electronic systems, tubing and piping equipment, to reduce overall design time and errors.

A DS PLM configuration management capability enables industrial equipment companies to easily manage alternate designs or build new designs on the data from previous projects. Coupled with workflow and shared catalogs,  configuration management enables clear communication of changes and reduces the risk of late-cycle errors.

And DS PLM’s strengths in extended enterprise business process governance for product portfolio management and program/project management bring the power of PLM to the entire enterprise, making sure the whole organization has the information it needs to remain agile and competitive.

Digital Manufacturing

During manufacturing planning, innumerable elements must be stringently coordinated and executed to stay on time and budget. Interconnected activities throughout manufacturing facilities must be carefully coordinated to achieve the safest, fastest, and most optimal sequence.

The fully integrated DS PLM environment supports Design for- Manufacturing to concurrently optimize design and manufacturing processes to reduce or eliminate costly clashes that otherwise might go undetected until installation.

The fully integrated DS PLM environment supports Design-for-Manufacturing to concurrently optimize design and manufacturing processes. Planning, scheduling, sequencing, Quality Analysis (Q/A) simulation, and virtual  commissioning of digital manufacturing can be defined to reduce or eliminate costly clashes that otherwise might go undetected until installation.

Digital manufacturing helps detect and eliminate mechanical collisions, optimize machine cycles and maximize resource utilization. DELMIA Automation bridges the gap between mechanical and automation engineering, allowing users to leverage virtual models and explore “what if?” scenarios. DS PLM significantly reduces product launch time by facilitating testing, validation, and debugging of systems before physical commissioning.

Lifetime Value

Customers want to maximize return on investment for the full life of a product. A turnkey solution that includes product, installation, operational and maintenance services ensures ongoing market success and a long-term flow of revenues.

The fully integrated DS PLM environment supports Design-for-Maintainability, optimizing design, installation, operation and maintenance processes. Designing with maintenance in mind also minimizes the cost of service after the sale and the support time involved in warranty work.

Design models can be leveraged to directly create 3D-based product  documentation that illustrates detailed operational and maintenance processes. Easy-to-follow instructions minimize training time and can be communicated entirely in 3D, eliminating text and the high cost of foreign-language translations. Functionality to identify spare or alternate parts early in the development cycle helps ensure critical parts are always on hand. All of these capabilities increase your value-add, helping to ensure repeat business.

Success demands the ability to deliver new and innovative strategies. PLM solutions from Dassault Systèmes enable rapid implementation, higher margins and faster return on investment.