PLM softwares are used widely around the globe and this is not going to slow down, hopefully for us . This means that from Italy to Mexico, Japan to South Africa or the USA to Australia, thousands of people are using our softwares everyday.

The knowledge and know-how capitalized by these people is a unique and huge value. Knowledge is key for innovation, sharing this knowledge is key for the humanity evolution (and not only in the field of PLM of course). Thus, people need to be connected in order to share and learn. So far, PLM MarketPlace aimed at “Connecting Partners”. We now want to extend this approach to the users.

All over the globe, there are some so called “CATIA User Groups”, gathering people who… guess what… share a common use of Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA ! In order to give you (no matter if you are a customer, a Solution Provider engineer, a VAR Sales Rep, a student…) an easier access to the group that might interest you, we’ve decided to start listing them under the Customers section of the PLM MarketPlace.

Get the best locally

Our goal is definitely to encourage knowledge and best practices sharing, all over the world. Someone at 10 000km from you may have faced the challenge you are facing today and can help you. Users of Dassault Systèmes and its Partners’ softwares are highly competent and talented people. They know the softwares maybe like no others and even sometimes better than we do! These Users Groups are key in our industry, be part of them opens unique opportunity in terms of sharing the knowledge, finding experts, benchmarking best practices, increasing individual competencies.

These Users Groups are traditionnaly specialized in one of our brands (the most famous one being maybe the COE – CATIA Operators Exchange – in the USA), in a specific industry such as automotive (GACI in Germany) or a domain like the NAFEMS for simulation enthusiasts. In conclusion, almost whatever your interest is, you’ll find an appropriate group somewhere.

But it’s sometimes hard to know in which user group you’ll find the right person, especially if we are talking about highly specialized solutions.

Explore new horizons

This is one of the reasons why almost two years ago, we have launched our LinkedIn business group. It offers an additionnal opportunity to find the right contact in a single place and share experience around Dassault Systèmes Partners’ complementary solutions. As of today, almost 1400 people are connected thanks to this business group and have discussions. Don’t hesitate to join this highly focused and specilized community, you may find there the right specialist in the world who can answer your question.To make it easier for all of our users, we have started to implement subgroups that provide a technical forum to discuss highly specialized matters! Last but not least, thanks to these groups, users can benefit from priviledged rates on some software and/or hardware offers.

We hope that this new access to the PLM User Groups offered by the PLM MarketPlace will be usefull for all of you. This page is meant to grow and we hope that we’ll be able to list all the CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, SIMULIA, 3DVIA User Groups all over the world. If you know (or are part of) one that is not listed here, please let us know and it will be added immediately.

Are you part of such groups? Do you think it is a valuable approach for the PLM MarketPlace to connect users not only with software providers but also to users? What do you expect from these groups and what do you bring to other users at the other side of the world? We think you opinion is key, for us of course, but above all, for all people involved in managing these User Groups on a daily basis…

Anthony Rosendo, on behalf of the PLM MarketPlace Team

Ever wondered how your own 3D avatar would look like for real? With James Cameron's movie "Avatar", 3D is becoming very popular and numerous Hollywood productions are going 3D these days. But these are movies, and all of us can only dream about having a 3D avatar and watching him as a separate entity.

Now we have made a really surprising experience at one of our local Dassault-Systemes 2010 Kick-Offs. In order to get a closer look to what's 3D, two of our Partners came with their hardware . They took a 3D picture of all of those not afraid to do so (no, no, there is no risk with 3D pictures!!) and then printed them in 3D.
How does it work?

Getting a 3D picture of your face

Noomeo's 3D scanner named Optinum goes around you in order to scan your face. You can see it in real time on a laptop. Numisoft is the software that reconstruct your 3D face in the computer so that there is no "hole" in your 3D model.

In this picture you can see Pierric Le Quement from Noomeo scanning our boss Bernard Charles, CEO of Dassault-Systemes.

Printing your face in 3D

The model information is sent to Objet's software in order to put together several 3D faces before sending them to Objet's 3D printer. So OK we have there several faces, but this is not mass production! Wink: Michael from Objet has highlighted my face in blue

Now Objet's 3D printer from the Connex Family is starting to build our faces in 3D, layer by layer (see the blue light on the left picture). When finished printing, we get nice 3D faces on a Business Card size (see right picture)

Here we are, everybody's got its 3D badge?
Your host proudly presenting its 3D trophy as a badge, with Michael Anton from Objet on the back. You can also see the Connex 3D printer on the left, not so big for such a machine, isn't it?

Well, the show is over now. I'm pretty sure that this kind of process will become straightforward in the future and that everybody will be able to have a physical 3D snapshot of its face soon.
I can tell you that it's really a strange feeling to watch ourself "from outside" in our hands! Only rich and famous people get their Portrait bust today, but it will not take long to share 3D faces on Facebook with your friends! 3D will be a reality for all very soon.

What was funny afterward was that male were happy just because they could watch themselves in 3D, while (some of) our female colleagues were eventually disappointed when seeing themselves without nice lightening on cosmetics... Well, we still have some work to do before our avatars are close to reality. Hopefully we can dream with 3D movie avatars in the meanwhile!

What's your view on the 3D scan & 3D print benefits? do you know any integrated business in this domain? Would you consider this can reach mass-market for consumers? I'd like to hear your thoughts on this topic.

PS: Great thanks to Pierric from Noomeo and to Michael from Objet, they could make this happen.

Jacques

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

Dear readers,

During last ECF09, you may have been interviewed by some people asking you questions about social medias, Web 2.0, communities,... We gathered hundreds of answers among visitors and exhibitors, allowing us to figure out how much PLM professionals know about these topics.

If you are interested in discovering the results of this poll performed by Dassault Systèmes on the IT/PLM professional community, you are welcome to attend the webinar

“Social Media in Europe : result of a poll focused on IT professionals usage”

on Wednesday January 20th at 4 pm (Paris Time) Duration: 30 min.

During this free webinar I will share with you the results of this face-to-face poll conducted on 330 IT professionals.

Topics covered:

- Spontaneous Awareness of social media
- Suggested Awareness of social media (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Viadeo,…)
- Social media actual registration pattern
- Frequency of use
- Private/ professional balance usage per media
- Best choice for professional use

If you are willing to attend, add this event to your Calendar and register.

Best regards;

The Dassault Systèmes e-Marketing Corporate Practice Team

 

Well, 2009 is really coming to its end, and after last week’s retrospective, and as promised, it is now time to look at the future! As we said, we’ve got really cool things to announce for the PLM MarketPlace community. In 2009 (also applies for the previous years ), we spent time meeting our customers, partners, resellers online but also for real (COE, DEVCON, ECF, …) and tried to find out how we could do better to help them.

Of course, today, it is still too soon to disclose everything, but this, for sure, what you will get from the PLM MarketPlace in 2010.

A growing catalog

The software catalog will welcome two new post-processors providers: ICAM and IMS. Their offers should be available online mid-/end-January. Note that in the field of post-processors, CENIT referenced their offer a few weeks ago.
On the hardware catalog side, we are very proud to announce that AMD decided to join the PLM MarketPlace! Their offer is scheduled to be available next month, a special announcement will be made once it is online, stay tuned!
Finally, we remind our services providers that we are still looking for candidates to be referenced on the Services Catalog of the PLM MarketPlace. The referencing mode is very flexible and made to comply with your business habits. Don’t hesitate to contact us to know more!

You remember IBM?

In October, Dassault Systèmes announced the acquisition of IBM PLM and its 700 Sales Reps. These guys showed interest in the PLM MarketPlace and the easy way it represents to deliver more value to customers. This is why, in the coming weeks, IBM PLM Sales Reps will be able to resell the solutions available on PLM MarketPlace! This represents a good opportunity to make a connection between customers and referenced partners… Again, “connecting partners” is our motto!

Buy one, get…

… maybe not one free but, for sure, in 2010, there will be special discounts from our referenced partners, even new ones! Check regularly the homepage (www.plmmarketplace.com) to discover the current discounts available and ask your VAR for more details!

2010 will be a year of new challenges and maybe, for some of us, of a new start. We want to remind you that we are here to help you find the best way to develop your activity, your business, meet your challenges,…

Consequently, whatever (well… almost )you need, feel free to contact us and ask, we’ll do our utmost to help you.

Customers, resellers, solutions providers, this program is yours and we are open to make it change the way you think it will help you. This is our challenge for 2010.

On behalf of Jacques and Alexandre, I wish you all the best for 2010!

Anthony Rosendo