Dassault Systèmes Helps Automotive OEMs and Suppliers Meet International Standards

New Business Process Accelerator Ensures the Legal Conformity of Automotive Architecture Design

Paris, France and Detroit, Michigan, April 16, 2007 ─ Dassault Systèmes (DS) (Nasdaq: DASTY; Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) today announced CAVA, its latest Business Process Accelerator (BPA) for the automotive industry. CAVA (CATIA Automotive extensions, Vehicle Architecture) works seamlessly with DS’s CATIA, the industry-standard for design excellence.  Today’s automakers must comply with multiple government-regulated standards and norms, and CAVA ensures legal conformity of the car architecture during the entire creation process, allowing companies to get designs right the first time.    

"We use CAVA for all projects we are involved with - to the benefit of our OEM clients and as a competitive advantage for us," says Siegfried Krammer, head of geometrical integration, Magna Steyr.  “It acts as an intelligent agent constantly cross-checking norms and standards against our designs throughout their lifecycles.  We simply receive an alert showing what must be adjusted in order to reach compliancy.”

“BPAs are the result of working hand in hand with our industry leading customers, through service agreements which allow us to repackage this experience as easy to deploy products. BPAs combine market leading industry knowledge with proven PLM solutions, which allow customers to gain rapid ROI. In increasingly regulated markets and industries, this gives customers a real competitive advantage,” says Bruno Latchague, executive vice president, PLM Business Transformation.  CAVA is a BPA created by Transcat PLM, a DS company, in collaboration with well-known automotive OEMs. 

CAVA includes solutions for vehicle architecture, vision, wipers, manikin, safety and other automotive design tasks. Each function contains the different values and settings determined by local authorities and described in norms like:  ECE, EWG, SAE, FMVSS and others.  All CAVA functions are implemented seamlessly within CATIA for easy access to the feature tree, enabling full associativity resulting from geometry modifications such as car body parts or references points. 

For more information, visit the Dassault Systèmes booth (#1767) at the SAE World Congress and view demonstrations of automotive solutions that can help companies improve quality, reduce costs and drive innovation throughout the product development cycle.