Challenge and opportunity can be said to be different sides of the same coin. Certainly that’s true for industry these days—especially for those in the product development and manufacturing space. The recent cover story in Compass Magazine, “Industry Renaissance transforms invention, learning, production and trade,” makes the case that the change going on in the current era is so profound that it rivals the invention of the printing press for how it reshapes society.
Welcome to the era of the “experience.” Gone are the days of manufacturing a simple, physical product. Today it’s all about solutions, services, and experiences—sometimes that’s a physical product plus an experience, sometimes that’s simply a service or experience with no tangible goods. Manufacturers—big and small, traditional and not—all scramble to meet what the Compass Magazine piece calls consumers’ “insatiable appetite for faster, slicker, personalized services.”
What makes the difference in this new market paradigm is the ability to virtualize and collaborate digitally, and to do that—to stay in the game—you’ve got to have the right tools.
What tools do you need?
To respond to customers and the market quickly, to adapt and personalize products, and to integrate physical products with services and experiences, manufacturers can’t rely on traditional habits, processes, and systems.
- Everything must be digital. Siloed information in filing cabinets isn’t going to cut it in the digital age, so the first key is you need all of your product information, from customer requests and preliminary designs to simulation and test data to marketing and supplier information, in digital form.
- Everything must be accessible to everyone. You also need all of that information in a single location, where it can be accessed by everyone who needs it. Customer input, marketing material, design files, manufacturing drawings, manufacturing workflows, and more should be co-located in a product file—a single source of truth for critical enterprise data.
- You’ve got to be able to collaborate. Everyone, everywhere access for corporate data is critical, but so is the ability for team members—and members of different cross-functional teams—to collaborate and share knowledge and know-how. As Shunqun Yang, from Yellow River Engineering Consulting, an international architectural engineering firm based in Zhengzhou, China, explains, “In traditional design, multiple layers of human reviews are required to avoid errors, omissions and collisions. However, with the single data source and real-time collaboration possible on our experience platform, a [single] review can identify and resolve problems early and avoid repeated modifications.” (Quoted in Compass Magazine.)
Be Part of the Renaissance with 3DEXPERIENCE
Dassault Systèmes’ product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, 3DEXPERIENCE ensures you have no more silos and no more islands of information. As one of the premier PLM platforms, it helps manufacturers manage a product from initial idea or request through to service after manufacturing, offering virtualization, collaboration support, and digital efficiency at every step along the way.
It starts with a centralized database, a single repository or vault where all product data is stored, accessible by everyone in—and even out of—the company who needs to participate. As members of the platform, individuals can view shared data, be part of collaborative tasks, and participate in virtual communities around project work. They can collaborate on design, simulation, virtual testing, manufacturing planning and simulation, and other tasks, communicating and saving all notes, changes, versions, and even automated approval routes through the centralized platform.
3DEXPERIENCE can help your organization transform your processes to ensure you take part in the Industry Renaissance. For more information, contact Adaptive.