Valeo

For over a century, Valeo has built its reputation on anticipating where mobility is heading and acting early. The company introduced the world to the first parking sensors and today is behind technologies such as adaptive lighting and augmented reality windshields to help drivers react faster and stay in control on the road.

“Innovation is at the heart of what we do as we bring greener, safer and smarter mobility to the world,” said Christophe Le Ligné, Group R&D vice president at Valeo. “The automotive industry is undergoing one of its greatest transformations as cars become electric and built around a centralized software architecture, known as software defined vehicles (SDV). We’ve pioneered innovations such as the first stop-start system and advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS), so this is a huge opportunity for us.”

Pace of innovation matters and Valeo is building a new engineering foundation to speed up product development and achieve full digital continuity across the business. At the heart of this transformation is a strategic partnership with Dassault Systèmes. Valeo is deploying the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform as its next-generation product lifecycle management (PLM) with ENOVIA unifying thousands of people across R&D, purchasing and manufacturing in a single, data-driven environment. By connecting every part of its engineering ecosystem, Valeo is unlocking new ways of working and bringing ideas to life faster through model-based systems engineering (MBSE), simulation, generative design and AI.

“Our growth strategy focuses on four major trends: electrification, ADAS, lighting and interior experience,” Le Ligné explained. “Behind it all is our R&D force of 20,000 people – 9,000 of which are software engineers. They need best-in-class solutions like the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to deliver best-in-class products. They now have a shared environment to seamlessly collaborate and deliver the future of mobility.”

Across the automotive industry, amid intensifying global competition, the timeline for bringing a new vehicle to market is shrinking. Valeo’s R&D must turn new concepts into production-ready solutions faster than ever while maintaining quality, traceability and performance.

“Innovation is a race,” Le Ligné said. “We now serve an industry that’s developing a car in less than 12 months, around three times faster than before. We need a shared foundation for quick, confident decision-making, and a digital environment that can keep pace with increasing complexity.”

Valeo’s Product and Process Data Management (PPDM) transformation program, anchored by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, directly addresses these challenges. The goal is to strengthen digital continuity across the product development lifecycle, connecting engineering and manufacturing around a consistent, authoritative source for product and process data with ENOVIA, fully connected into Valeo’s wider digital ecosystem.

The decision also reflects the growing need for closer partnerships across the industry. As software, electronics, mechanical and AI systems converge, suppliers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) must align their requirements and resolve design trade-offs earlier in the development cycle.

“Dassault Systèmes is a reference in this space and many of our OEM customers use its solutions so it makes sense to do the same,” Le Ligné said. “We also consider that Dassault Systèmes has the best offering in terms of mechanical design, systems engineering and lifecycle management on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.”

A digital transformation of this scale takes time. Initially, Valeo is rolling out the 3DEXPERIENCE platform across its R&D teams before eventually extending to the wider business. To guide adoption and measure impact, the company is setting KPIs to track value across the product lifecycle. Until then, the short-term focus is on moving decades of legacy product data to the platform and adapting it to Valeo’s specific requirements while keeping it flexible and easy to maintain.

“My team’s mission is to equip Valeo’s 20,000 R&D and project engineers with a seamless, high-performing digital environment,” said Clotilde Saint‑Marcoux, vice president of R&D digital solutions and information systems at Valeo. “By eliminating operational friction, we empower them to focus 100% of their energy on product innovation and customer satisfaction. Of course, if you don’t configure a powerful system like this properly, it doesn’t deliver value. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever we change remains compatible with future versions of the PLM. The result is a more sustainable approach to transformation where innovation is continuous but controlled, and where each evolution of the platform builds on a stable, shared foundation.”

Alongside its PLM transformation, Valeo is deploying CATIA Magic and moving towards model-based systems engineering (MBSE), where complex systems are designed, tested and refined in a structured way through connected digital models. The shift is as much cultural as it is technical. It asks engineers to think beyond individual components and consider how entire systems behave, interact and evolve.

“Our people need to be supported by powerful solutions,” Saint-Marcoux said. “Due to the increasing complexity of our projects, systems engineering is crucial for Valeo. Adoption is growing steadily, and the teams using CATIA Magic are already seeing the benefits. The solution allows us to manage requirements as we model the complete system, allocating customer requirements and transforming them into specification points we deliver across every discipline: software, mechanics, electronics and functional safety.”

Early use is strongest among software teams, where systems thinking is already a familiar concept. But the ambition is much broader: to bring mechanical, electrical and software engineering together within a single, coherent framework.

“We are moving away from a culture of isolated files toward a dynamic, data-driven ecosystem,” Saint-Marcoux said. “Generalizing MBSE, through the use of CATIA Magic, allows us to connect our systems architecture directly with software and physical engineering, unlocking the full power of multi-disciplinary collaboration.”

Indeed, as data begins to flow seamlessly from one development stage to the next, every team will gain a clearer view of how the products they’re working on evolve in real time, seeing what’s changed and how any modifications affect them.

“We’re bringing together the worlds of design, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and engineering systems through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and this will give us the continuity we need,” Le Ligné said. “There’s no more bill of materials being manually copied from one system to another, with all the risk of errors that involves, and when we make any product modifications, they show up everywhere at once. It’s a time saving and a guarantee to the customer that we manage all requirements end to end.”

Valeo’s partnership with Dassault Systèmes shows what happens when a Tier 1 supplier and a science-based tech company share a common vision for more sustainable mobility and commit to making it happen by jointly developing a digital engineering ecosystem.

Day to day, Valeo’s product specialists, system architects and manufacturing experts work directly with Dassault Systèmes to test ideas early, shape how the platform evolves and make sure new capabilities and features address real engineering challenges.

“The first innovation was putting the two R&D teams together, speaking the same language and discovering each other,” Saint-Marcoux said.

On a strategic level, this spirit of collaboration reaches the highest levels of leadership. Through a joint Innovation Lab, Valeo and Dassault Systèmes are committed to exploring how generative design, data science and advanced modeling could reshape how complex mobility systems are designed and brought to life.

“Our engineers develop innovative solutions combining hardware and software, and leveraging AI to make tomorrow’s mobility safer and more sustainable,” said Christophe Périllat, CEO at Valeo. “Thanks to our partnership with Dassault Systèmes, our teams will have more efficient solutions enabling digital continuity to support our world leading R&D activities.”

“It felt completely natural to go to Dassault Systèmes to discuss generative design and AI, and to jointly build an innovation lab where engineers from both companies work together on solutions that let us accelerate even further,” Le Ligné added. “The willingness from Dassault Systèmes to go above and beyond for us is not something you see very often.”

In parallel, both companies are laying the groundwork for the rise of AI in industry and creating the right conditions with structured data, connected systems and consistent models to turn its potential into practical value.

“There is not a single autonomous vehicle driving today without artificial intelligence in it,” Le Ligné said. “AI is also completely disrupting the way we engineer products. Today, an engineer working under time pressure can typically explore two or three design options. With generative AI on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, they’ll be able to explore hundreds and make the best offer to our customers from both a technical and economic standpoint. Ultimately, Valeo is a technology company and through our partnership with Dassault Systèmes we’re putting humans back at the center of innovation, testing, co-constructing and preparing for the engineering of tomorrow.”