Shinmei Streamlines Design Process with Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA Solution

CATIA Helps Reduce Drawing Creation Time by 50% with Automatic Design Templates

Tokyo, Paris – September 28, 2007 –Dassault Systèmes (DS) (Nasdaq: DASTY; Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced that Shinmei Co., Ltd. (Shinmei), a leading manufacturer of automotive production facilities, has streamlined its design process and reduced lead time with CATIA, DS’s solution for virtual product design.

“Our vision is the same as DS, to build an efficient product-creation environment which will seamlessly leverage product-related 3D data from our sales, design, purchasing, manufacturing and installation departments, as well as sharing it with stakeholders across the value chain,” says Haruhiko Watanabe, manager, Automotive Sales & Technical division, Shinmei Co., Ltd.  “Our team collaboration has consequently improved, and our time to market has reduced from 5 to 2.5 months."

“We are pleased that Shinmei has incorporated a PLM strategy into its corporate vision and have begun reaping advantages with CATIA,” says Nikos Calfacacos, general manager, Dassault Systèmes Japan.  “This positions Shinmei well to consistently generate highly reliable products and increase its competitive edge.”

Shinmei was under pressure to reduce lead time and improve its production facilities reliability when it turned to DS.  With DS’s CATIA solution, Shinmei created a set of automated design templates, which allowed designers to streamline and standardize the design process, allowing more time for innovation.  As a result, Shinmei reduced its drawing creation time by 50 percent.

Shinmei also created a 3D digital mock-up (DMU) skeleton template using DMU Kinematics Simulator to perform synchronized dynamic interference checks on complex assemblies, detect collisions between parts earlier in the product development process, and make the crucial design modifications before the production phase where they can be very costly to implement. DS’s solutions were implemented by local business partner Toyota Caelum.