Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS Industry Predictions

Gian Paolo, CEO, Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS

As we announced at the beginning of 2020, we have initiated the most consequential transformation SOLIDWORKS has ever undertaken with the introduction of the 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio. We want to expand from a product-focused organization to a platform-oriented organization.

Why? Because the world of design is changing and the pace of innovation is accelerating. In 1870 it took 35 years for one quarter of the U.S. population to adopt the telephone, in 2009 in just five years, a quarter of the U.S. population adopted social networks.

Platforms lower the barrier for businesses and individuals to innovate. Platforms enable new paradigms and help build creative communities that are vital to stimulate and foster innovation.     Platforms, therefore, can and will transform businesses that want to stay relevant and competitive.

Our first prediction for 2021 is that we will see a dramatic acceleration in the adoption of our 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio because the industry is undergoing a retooling to realize full digital continuity from design to manufacturing to support accelerated innovation.

Last year presented the entire world with a host of challenges as a consequence of COVID-19 and the resulting lockdowns and quarantines. Remote working conditions have become the norm so all companies are looking for better and safer ways to collaborate with all stakeholders, and nowhere is this more important than in product development.  After all, without the ability to iterate, collaborate and share feedback on ideas, true collaborative design cannot happen.  More collaboration leads to highly optimized designs, the goal of all product developers.

Our second prediction is that in 2021, there will a very strong demand for platforms that embed seamless and agile collaboration among teams regardless of their location or IT infrastructure. When everyone is working in the same real-time environment, collaboration is intuitive, facilitating the exchange of ideas, improving coordination, assuring traceability and accountability and fostering more innovation.

By connecting the SOLIDWORKS our users know and love to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, they will have the ability to use tools that were beyond their reach before, such as nonlinear simulation or Sub-D modeling. First however, let’s discuss the reasons behind the move to the cloud.

The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, famously declared the death of Moore’s Law at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Moore’s Law, the long-held notion that the processing power of computers increases exponentially every couple of years, might have reached its limit. I’m not here to fuel the debate on this issue, but one thing is undoubtedly true: computer speed is not increasing at the rate it once did, while the need for more computational power to process AI-based algorithms or more complex simulation is increasing faster than ever.

At the same time we can expect that bandwidth and connectivity will only increase and improve in the future. As millions of people across the world are now learning and working from home due to the coronavirus, internet networks have been put to the test. They have, for the most part, persevered as have the legions of workers suddenly now working remotely.

Our third prediction is that the objections to adopt cloud solutions will become less and less relevant as more business need more computational power to run sophisticated simulation and optimization algorithms.

With a platform-based approach to product development companies can gain better insights from their data, which is their most important asset. Data to be safely shared and collaborated on in real-time with key stakeholders. And, with intuitive access to real-time data, users can manage its complexity and make better-informed decisions faster that lead to greater profitability. 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS offers roles specialized in market and business intelligence that are key to operational excellence and optimal business performance.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits is that a platform approach means there is always a single, online, always available “source of truth.” This makes companies more agile, more flexible and resilient to disruptions like we are seeing today. By having one single source of truth, you can quickly get to the root cause of problems and more rapidly resolve them, increasing quality and ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Our fourth prediction is that the demand of technology to run advanced analytics will surge, a prerequisite for that is to have a “single source of truth” for all company data.

Product development using the 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions also assures digital continuity, meaning companies can automate updates of both software and data so everyone is on the same release and on the same page as far as product status because everyone is always working on real-time data. Time-consuming updates are now a thing of the past.

By connecting SOLIDWORKS to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, you can create seamless product development workflows and easily extend them with new tools as your business needs evolve. This connected design-to-manufacturing ecosystem enables teams to collaborate on real-time data anywhere and at any time on any Internet-enabled device.

Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of working in a cloud-based product development environment, such as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, is that the cost of your IT infrastructure is significantly lowered. No longer do you need powerful, expensive workstations and servers. You also have the ability to scale up—or down—as needed and add new tools, such as advanced simulation, that you never dreamt possible.

By moving your SOLIDWORKS data to the cloud, you can still use the SOLIDWORKS you know and love but also reap the benefits on built-in data management that enables you to do more with your data.

Only you know what’s best for your company so SOLIDWORKS provides design and development tools on the desktop; pure cloud-based tools, such as 3D Creator; or a hybrid approach that enables you to use SOLIDWORKS on the desktop and then connect it to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform so you can collaborate with any of your key stakeholders anywhere and on any device.

Our last prediction is that businesses will need for the next foreseeable future full flexibility to support their transformation journey at the pace they want and still enjoy the benefits of a modern design platform, and at the same time leverage the assets and the investments of the past years without disruption.

Our 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio uniquely offers our users the choice of desktop, cloud-connected or pure cloud solutions. While some will choose to stay on desktop, many are now investigating the many reasons why this might be the right time to more to a cloud-based product development environment.

We certainly hope that 2021 is a better year, with fewer challenges ahead, but the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is here to stay so perhaps there is no better time to take your first step onto the design platform of the future.

Tags: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021 at 16:18. 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.