ELSYS serves top companies from aerospace, automotive, rail and manufacturing industries. Their applications are designed for industries which develop products combining mechanical and electrical technologies and require specialized diagram, bundle and harness design and wiring applications.

Air France Industries core business has always been the maintenance or modification of aircraft, being civil or military. For some years now, Air France Industries has been developing competency in aircraft design, leading to the improvement of passengers & crews comfort and also the avionics. In those areas, they faced some electrical systems related challenges. In this field, thanks to ELSYS and Dassault Systèmes, Air France Industries is now fully able to meet their customers' expectations.

The challenges

• Reduce aircraft down time.
• Keep to the standards and environments of every aircraft manufacturer.
• Harmonize designs around a consistent set of electrical design and management tools.
• Manage the product life cycle from end to end and ensure traceability.

How ELSYS made things happen

The initial solution chosen by Air France Industries is based on ELECTRE for wiring diagram studies, SMARTELECTRE for the management of electrical data in SMARTEAM, and CATELECTRE for integration with CATIA.

By doing so, Air France engineers can accommodate the maintenance, modification and design requirements of aircraft systems and specific features (seat layout, galleys, toilets, passenger entertainment, etc.) while improving aircraft down times. These solutions make it easier and simpler for Air France Industries to satisfy the special requirements of aeronautical engineering, such as:
- ATA standards (Airbus and Boeing), when modifying and creating electrical engineering documents,
- Specific documentation requirements in connection with configuration management,
- Simple, transparent management of electrical parts lists, however complex, in SmarTeam.

The customer's voice

“The ELECTRE solution that has been implemented saves us an enormous amount of time and totally meets the manufacturers’ standards. It covers almost 100 % of our requirements…The complementary of the electrical CAD products from ELSYS and the data management products from Dassault Systèmes is excellent. With the SMARTELECTRE integration platform, it means we can manage the life cycle of electrical products from end to end. This advanced solution makes a major contribution to our 100 % quality objective… I have great confidence in ELSYS - they’re very honest people. They are proactive, customer-focused and always find the solution. With them you can say that it’s possible, it’s quick and it’s not expensive! CGM Import-Export is a prime example of this.”

Frédéric Speyer, IT Project Manager, EDP Support,
AIR France Industries, Roissy Charles de Gaulle

You can read more about the successful collaboration between ELSYS and Air France Industries and contact me.

Jéronimo FREITAS - Business Development ELSYS
Twitter: @jeronimofreitas

Activities associated with altitude such as mountain climbing, mountaineering and work in suspension require strong and secure equipments providing a high level of security and allowing people to do it under the best conditions. Climbing is a difficult activity that requires a lot of efforts. In order to optimize those efforts workers need to get the best equipment from the shoes to the carabiner.

PETZL's mission has been the same for 30 years now: to invent concrete solutions enabling people to go higher with less risk, day and night. PETZL had a new project consisting in reducing carabiners' weight by 25% while maintaining their mechanical properties and performance above the required standards. And, of course, controlling manufacturing costs as well.

DPS' solution
Considering those facts, French PLM company DPS used an approach of integration of analysis in the product design that is currently widespread in the automotive and aeronautics industries. According to Raphaël Lanez, manager of the project, this was the key to the project.
DPS staff also listened actively in order to meet PETZL's needs. The project proposals made by DPS provided critical insight and enabled them to anticipate their needs, to offer a new, non-intuitive geometry. They also resulted in the development of digital methods to optimize component weight.

One step further
In addition to reducing the weight of the carabiner by 25%, DPS enabled PETZL to save time by significantly lowering the number of CAD calculation iterations. PETZL even succeeded in obtaining a significant decrease in the number of prototypes and tests. These benefits led to a reduction in product development time, representing 3 to 4 working months, or 15% time savings gained for the project overall.

Following this very successful collaboration, PETZL wishes to apply these optimization and integration methods to the design of other products for the brand.

Read the full DPS / PETZL success story.

Discover how DPS solutions can help you.

Image courtesy of Traceparts

Airbus' planes fly into the sky thanks to a lot of people working hard to make it happen. For that they also work with 3D tools to study, create, test, etc. every single part of each plane. Airbus and its partners in French plants are working on CATIA V5 to design the tooling. "The tooling is made up of a large number of standard parts bought from supplier catalogues: fastenings, clamping and handling parts, bushings, cylinders, etc. and each site or sub-contractor was modeling parts it needed with a specific name and level of detail", says Laurent SENOT, a Dassault Data Services consultant who works with Airbus.

This being said, Airbus was looking for a solution to simplify this process and get a homogeneous library of components that would be used by each site and suppliers.

Traceparts brought the solution

Our partner Traceparts is a French provider who delivers standard parts library seamlessly integrated with CATIA V5. They were choosen by Airbus France, Airbus Spain and Airbus UK for its functionalities, its content and its ability to adapt its solution to their specific requirements.

Additionnally to the fact that they are the only one library developer to have the status of CAA V5 Software Partner, they were able to customize their software on a number of imperatives leading to a close collaboration.

Traceparts and Airbus are working on a brand new version, currently in a deployment phase that integrates notable developments such as the automatic replacement of instanced parts by other components and allow Airbus to build its own parts into the library.

Discover how Traceparts can work for you. Read the full success story.

Alexandre and the Traceparts Team

When you go for a ride or try a vehicle at a car dealer’s before buying a brand new one, one of the most important parameter is the comfort provided by the seats. There is no more direct contact between people and the machine excepted through the seats. It is also the second thing you can appreciate (or not) after the look of the car. This is why car and car-seats manufacturer must do their utmost to provide the future driver and passengers with the best user experience.

Faurecia needs it, LMS provides it!

Faurecia is Europe leading automotive seating system manufacturer and one of the top three worldwide. The company had two projects on which they had to find an optimal solution. One of them requiring kinematic and load calculations to be performed on a seat height adjuster mechanism controlled by the driver/passenger using a pump lever with a low operating torque for easy actuation and the other one on rear-vehicle storage capacity.

The solutions came thanks to LMS's software LMS Virtual.Lab Motion in which you can simulate the realistic motion and loads of mechanical systems. It permits design engineers to quickly analyze and optimize the real-world behavior of mechanical designs and to guarantee that they perform as expected, before committing to expensive physical prototype testing.

Design process improvement

On their first project Faurecia used the software to create a virtual model of the mechanism by importing data from CAD. LMS Virtual.Lab’s ability to represent non-permanent contact between parts - an important feature since contact plays a critical role in determining friction between so many moving parts. Modeling these contacts in LMS Virtual.Lab Motion lets seat engineers accurately predict normal and tangential forces on these components.

On the other project, Faurecia used LMS’ solutions to study the backrest fold-down capability to increase rear-vehicle storage capacity. Dynamic simulations were also used to study the real-life behavior of the car seat under actual passenger seating conditions. Currently under development, this "Easy Break" function relies on springs at the lever joints to help actuate the seat with minimal applied pressure.

1-2-3 model template for future designs

And that isn't all: thanks to LMS Virtual.Lab Motion, designers will gain a huge amount of time using this fold-down function. They will "just" have to enter key parameters into a simulation template instead of recreating models from scratch each time.

Now when you will seat on a car, you will probably ask yourself what's under it. Maybe you will talk about it to your car seller but I'm not sure they will help… So take advantage of this blogpost to ask your questions to LMS!

> Find out how LMS Virtual.Lab Motion can help you and discover the other solutions of LMS.
> Read the full LMS-Faurecia success story.

Alexandre

In a recent newsletter, our partner Vision Numeric told us about their successes in the watch, jewellery and microtechnics industries. Vision Numeric is the software Company behind "Type3" solutions, and these solutions have just been put in place at Createch, a French company based in Besançon (near the Switzerland frontier). Createch is specialized in the design, development and production of these luxury parts, they are working for the most famous names of Place Vendôme (Paris).

Createch has been using CATIA software for many years with two 6 axes Bumotec S191 machining center. When their customers asked for engraved parts, Createch asked it to a Value Added Reseller and was put through Vision numeric. They are DS software partners for 6 years, specialized in artistic CAD CAM, and they could propose a solution. On-site qualifications allowed Createch users to confirm that Vision numeric add-in, Type3 CAAV5 Based, was the answer they needed. Createch placed an order and their team was trained within days. 

This story is interesting because it shows that partners solutions made available by our PLM MarketPlace partners can be quickly deployed to Small and Medium customers. We think sharing this kind of experience in SMB can be usefull for other customers also looking for solutions to their specialized needs. All of our referenced partners (Software and resellers) are invited to share with our community their success stories. Stories may be published on this blog and/or on our Customer pages.

Jacques