MCADCafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – BASSETTI

By David BASSETTI, founder and CEO, Bassetti Group

Digitalization is key!

David Bassetti

One of the key challenges for the industry in 2024 will continue to be the indispensable digitalization of all production and business processes. The steady advance of Industry 4.0, in which the intelligent interconnectivity of machines, processes and data becomes part of everyday life, will be a pivotal factor for competitiveness. Companies that miss out on this transformation run the real risk of being left behind. At the same time, they must also meet a growing and increasingly complex number of regulatory and environmental requirements. Without investing in new technologies that guarantee complete documentation and traceability, it is almost impossible to comply with all the existing and upcoming e.g. quality requirements or ISO standards. In relation to the technological changeover, there is also the increasingly decisive factor of making know-how and implicit knowledge of high added value usable and accessible, especially for industrial companies that are heavily dependent on skilled workers. Here, from a digital perspective, an openness to restructuring must also be established so that key issues, such as the increasing need to automate processes, can progress and a focus on the company’s core competencies can be retained. The main challenge here is to find a balance between human expertise and automated processes. The integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analyses can and will make a major contribution to this allowing well-founded decisions to be made and realize efficiency gains.

Personally, I am firmly convinced that whether it’s in times of crisis (to save costs and focus on value-adding activities) or economic upswing (to promote innovation and remain competitive) – the digitalization of processes and the management of technical and tacit knowledge will be the key to every industrial company.

In order to meet this persistently growing demand for digital transformation, we at BASSETTI are pursuing a comprehensive growth strategy in the new year, which is paired with major investments in product and tool innovations.

BASSETTI, that’s a company I founded 30 years ago, offering TEEXMA, the only modular and configurable, end-to-end software solution designed to capture, leverage and process technical and scientific data for the industry. Currently over 600 companies worldwide and more than 200,000 users across various industries rely on TEEXMA to improve product design, transmit knowledge, and optimize processes.

We are orchestrating our growth strategy for the group based on the three key areas – geography, industries and products – which also show major overlaps within them and can therefore be understood more as a matrix.

In the area of geographical growth, BASSETTI has already successfully established itself in the three most important economic zones in recent years, namely Asia (China & India), Europe (France & Germany) and North America (USA & Canada) and has adapted its offering to local specifications. A decentralized structure also allows neighboring countries to be served from the nearest branches, such as Switzerland and Belgium from France, or Austria from Germany. In 2024, we look forward to expanding the BASSETTI Group with Tunisia and thus North Africa, another region with great potential. A foothold in this region enables us both to ensure local access to important projects in various industries in this region, and to extremely well-trained specialists, as well as to keep expansion risks low, for example through minor language barriers as French is shared as an official language. Even within the individual regions – such as Europe – additional countries can be opened up through new subsidiaries if a critical mass of customers is exceeded or if it appears strategically favorable.

In addition, the focus will be on further developing and gaining expertise in new sectors in 2024. Even though BASSETTI has historically been primarily active in industrial sectors such as aerospace, the automotive industry and the energy sector, a strong diversification has already become apparent in recent years, in line with our claim to be an expert in all industrial sectors. In addition to organic growth, we are consequently also focusing on external growth, which allows us to create synergies and tap more easily into promising sectors such as the pharmaceutical and food industries thanks to existing expertise in the acquired companies. Next year, for example, acquisitions in the USA and Germany are on the horizon, which, in addition to new know-how in the pharmaceutical sector, will also help us to be more decentralized in such important industrial nations. Overall, we are aiming for a target of 30% sales growth in the international branches, which we also want to support through the expansion of strategically important positions, such as a new Director of Global Operations.

However, one of the most important growth factors for BASSETTI has always been its comprehensive and coherent product portfolio, which is constantly being expanded with new tools and innovations. Trends and developments that we have already embraced in recent years include a stronger focus on SaaS & cloud solutions, new solutions in the areas of additive manufacturing or MES systems, all of which have become part of our modular TEEXMA platform. As part of our aforementioned acquisition strategy, we were also able to respond to a market trend and expand with the company KNOWLLENCE the scope of our TEEXMA for Quality offering with a powerful FMEA module.

Yet one of the most important game changers is and will be artificial intelligence, which is reflected in emerging trends as well as comprehensive customer expectations.

I often hear our R&D department say that 2024 will be the year of AI at BASSETTI and I am personally convinced that our growth and AI strategy will be the perfect match for a prosperous BASSETTI future. The use and development of AI for our tools can be broken down into 3 areas – in which we have analyzed the greatest benefits and the highest customer expectations – each working with different technology approaches.

AI for Data: The focus here is on tools for the use and evaluation of technical & scientific data. Towards Intuitive Data Management through AI, some solutions such as the REMIND are already developed and implemented by the group. They integrate advanced AI algorithms to expedite the processing and visualization of data from laboratories and R&D services. REMIND’s data analysis features provide in-depth insights, helping researchers and engineers to steer their research work more quickly and in a more targeted manner, which in principle corresponds to data prediction technology.

AI for Knowledge Management: In this area, we are primarily driving forward the development of tools based on the LLM (Large Language Model). This involves the goal of a simple interaction of the user with our tools through the use of natural language processing (NLP).

As a combination or bridge of these two already mentioned areas can be seen the AI for automated data extraction. The goal here is to facilitate the digitization of knowledge from unstructured information by automatically structuring it and putting it into a database.

What I am particularly excited about are the results from a current collaboration with academic university laboratories in the field of AI for Automated planning. Together we are researching an algorithm for automated planning & scheduling with AI for constrained based planning, an enormously important topic for almost all industrial companies. This is a generic method with AI support for automatically calculating planning based on the constraints given to the tool so that it can adapt to all possible situations and constraints in TEEXMA. If you imagine test request planning in a laboratory, for example, the materials, machines and personnel used must be optimized for specific goals – such as budget or time – based on the number of external requests. The aim of these AI-supported algorithms is to provide decision support to become much more reactive to unforeseen events.

Data security is also an increasingly important issue for our customers. We are addressing this not only at an internal level, such as through the forthcoming certification in accordance with ISO standard 27001, but also through the use of new technologies. For example, our MES solution for additive manufacturing will be equipped with secure traceability based on blockchain technology.

One of our most important products for our customers with enormous demand continues to be digitization towards more efficient laboratory management. Efficient laboratory management is crucial for scientific advancements. We focus on the development of integrated solutions that streamline research processes, enhance collaboration between teams, and optimize resource management. Our goal is to unleash the potential of researcher-engineers by providing them with advanced management tools, powerful data analytics, and innovative collaboration platforms.

About Author:

David Bassetti (born September 16, 1969) is a French Entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Bassetti Group, a software and engineering company headquartered in France.

David Bassetti graduated from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble and has a PhD in Materials Science. He founded Bassetti in 1992 and grew his company from a small start up to a multinational group consisting of 400 engineers with subsidiaries in China, India, France, Germany, Canada, and the United States.

Bassetti has created the software TEEXMA, the only modular and configurable, end-to-end software solution designed to capture, leverage and process technical and scientific data for industry. Currently over 600 companies worldwide and 200,000 users across various industries rely on TEEXMA to improve product design, transmit knowledge, and optimize processes.

Category: Predictions

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2024 at 3:19 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.