IBM and Dassault Systèmes Announce Industry Solution for Electrical and Electronics Manufacturers

“Integrated Mechanical Product Development” first in series of E&E industry-specific PLM solutions -- speeds mechanical product development while strengthening innovation

Paris, France – January 8, 2004 – IBM and Dassault Systèmes (Nasdaq: DASTY, Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) today announced an IBM Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Industry Solution for the Electrical and Electronics (E&E) industry. The Integrated Mechanical Product Development for Electronics (IMPD) solution links the applications and disciplines involved in mechanical product development and enables manufacturers to reuse valuable corporate intellectual property.

The IMPD solution consists of a set of integrated products from CATIA and SMARTEAM combined with a set of DS PLM Practices developed for the E&E industry. IMPD streamlines mechanical product development operations by increasing the amount of semantic data exchanged between applications and development disciplines such as style, design, manufacturing, and analysis.

By maintaining the product’s design history across all stages of development, the IMPD solution enables E&E companies to shorten time to market and focus on innovation. It allows them to explore more design possibilities in less time, capture and reuse existing features or assemblies made context sensitive, keep automatic links between part and mold design, create designs in accordance with corporate standards through automatic guidance, and take into account quickly and seamlessly the results of digital simulation and analysis.

“PLM solutions from IBM and Dassault Systèmes have proven instrumental in capturing, managing and sharing corporate know-how to ensure compliance of product and processes with corporate standards and best practices in terms of integration and optimization,” Toshiyuki Nakazaki, director of Research and Development at car-audio electronics manufacturer Clarion.

“In electrical and electronics manufacturing, rapid innovation is the name of the game,” said Thomas Friel, worldwide Electronics business leader, IBM PLM. “To help our customers optimize their product development operations, we have developed a comprehensive solution uniting IBM BCS services with IBM PLM Solutions and have included best practices developed with leading electronics manufacturers in all domains of electro-mechanical product development. This winning combination integrates the design process with analysis and tool design, provides morphing capability for design re-use and supports the ability to make rapid changes late in the design cycle. The new solution will help our E&E customers deliver more stylish and innovative products to market faster, laying the groundwork for their future success.”

“E&E manufacturers face very specific challenges in their industry, namely, rapidly changing customer tastes, short time to market, and a large number of actors involved in product development,” said Etienne Droit, executive vice president Sales and Services, Dassault Systèmes. “IMPD is a federating solution that unifies the often fragmented approach to product development in the E&E industry, and in doing so, provides a precious opportunity for business-process reengineering.”