The 2010 European Conference of our CAA V5 Partner CD-adapco took place last 2 days in London with more than 300 attendies, a big growth compare to 2009 edition.

SIMULIA was this year the Gold Conference Exhibitor and gaining a good exposure in the Exhibition with 17 other companies.
Several contacts with existing customers and prospects from UK, France, Netherland, Denmark.
CD-adapco is partnering with SIMULIA for the Fluid-Structure Interactions  FSI  and with CATIA for STAR-CAT5 (available on PLM MarketPlace) 

Key Note Speaker for SIMULIA with examples of the collaboration between Fluid and Structure analysis have been driving lot of attention from the conference attendees.

Presentations were focused this year on growing industries, interesting domains not only for SIMULIA but also for other DS Brands:
In ENERGY sector, several papers on Oil&Gas simulation, Nuclear power simulation and Battery design & simulation (a strategic component in green initiatives)
In CONSTRUCTION, increasing demand for virtual prototypes in Civil Engineering
In Ship Building with Design Optimization
see detailed AGENDA for more information’s. All proceedings should be available in the next 2 weeks on their mini website.
(feel free to contact me if you need a specific paper)
 
Many Case studies linked to DS industry focus are also posted on CD-adapco web site. Have a look if you need examples of STAR products linked to your customers

You can also review one of their numerous recorded Webinars or Video presentations to get deeper understanding on the value of their solutions in your preferred industry.
 
Jean-Philippe

I have been at the recent LMS user conference in Munich where more than 200 experts in Engineering Simulation have gathered to discuss industry challenges and solutions.

Of course LMS has presented their rev.9 of Virtual.Lab for 3D functional performance simulation, with the stack of solutions for Acoustics, Durability & Fatigue and Motion that works seamlessly in the CATIA V5 environment. Those solutions are accessible via the PLM MarketPlace in the LMS page.

This rev.9 is packed with innovative technologies and advancements in functionalities and has received appraisal in user reviews, e.g. the one in MCAD Café. Please go there to have all the technical details, bells and whistles.

The acoustics simulation in particular seems to offer major breakthroughs in meeting industry challenges in this domain.

If you want you can enjoy my personal review from the 2 days in Munich on 3D Perspectives Blog. Here I take a look on the subject of Acoustics and Sound Design and what it means to the success of a manufacturing brand (cars and Daimler as an example).

Click on the picture to read my personal review of the event

My carry-out from the conference was that LMS showed a very strong commitment to fully grasp their customers’ needs and to help them to find answers. Dr’s Urbain Vanddeurzen, LMS CEO, and Jan Leuridan, Executive VP & CTO, stated in their plenary keynote that LMS does Technology Contributions to support development process at their customers. This is what it is. They do this within a user community of more than 100,000 engineers, with 1,000 employees at LMS and with re-invested revenue of 25% in R&D. Keep up the good work.

Click on the picture to watch the video

Feel free to ask your questions or comments regarding LMS and Virtual.Lab in the comments section or to LMS Director-Product Management Virtual.Lab Nick Tzannetakis (nick.tzannetakis@lmsintl.com) directly.

Best,
Michael

Manufacturing vaccines is a complicated business. Not just because the production process isn't simple, but also because it involves people's health. The development of vaccines requires specific controls that will determine the quality of the final patent.
First there is the selection of small amounts of virus that will be kept under "ideal" conditions, preventing the virus from becoming either stronger or weaker. 
Then there is the growing virus phase, in which the virus is placed in a "cell factory" allowing the virus cells to multiply.

During the separation phase, the virus will be separated from microscopic particles to which the viruses can attach themselves.

Sanofi goes with Intercim

The understanding of such manufacturing process is one of the key elements to master products quality and production units performances. Since 2003, Sanofi Pasteur (a division of Sanofi-aventis group) uses the Pertinence Suite solution to better understand, improve reliability and optimize industrial processes. The software solution will be used within the European and North American sites.

"Manufacture and guarantee the highest level of quality and safety for the patient and the optimum performances for the company are key objectives of process understanding. [...] The use of Pertinence Suite for understanding mechanisms which drive our complex processes is an asset to answer to this double requirement in an efficient manner."
René Labatut, VP Manufacturing of Sanofi Pasteur

With Intercim's solutions, Sanofi Pasteur can identify and set up in real-time parameters influencing the product quality and, moving forward, better control process variability. This is a recurrent challenge for the pharmaceutical industry which needs to consistently deliver vaccines on time, with a perfect traceability.

This deployment demonstrates the willingness to implement in a very operational manner the approach promoted by the regulatory bodies through the ICH Quality by Design (QbD). This approach aims at mastering manufactruring processes and efficiently sharing with the authorities the understanding of the mechanisms which drive products critical quality attributes.

 

See also what Dassault Systèmes solutions can offer the life sciences industry

A story by Creaform

That’s the (very philosophical) question that was casually thrown on Creaform's team meeting table back about a year ago, as we were trying to find a way to stretch our legs with a project that would pose a technical challenge to our team and soothe our fast-developing Olympic fever, all in one stroke.
We had just read an article from the CBC News Website presenting the winner of the contest to design the 2010 Olympic Winter Games logo. A bit of Internet research led us to a few pictures of the Inukshuk the article mentioned as the inspiration for the logo. Located on the beach at English Bay, close to Stanley Park, the statue has been standing there since 1986. It was first part of the North-West Territories pavilion during the Expo, and later donated to the city of Vancouver. That’s the historical end of it.

As we looked at the pictures, we suddenly realized it’s a pretty big statue. This would require some logistics planning. We decided Jérôme Baillargeon and Mathieu Magnan, 2 experienced Application Specialists, would pay the statue its scanning visit, and Louis-Philippe Gendron, our freshly-hired 3D Animation Artist, would start working on the storyboard and the 3D environment. For the logistics, we called in Julie Martineau, Marketing Writer.

Scanning the stone landmark

Everybody was immediately enthusiastic. Julie proceeded to unwind the kilometres of red tape to get the various permits and licenses for the 3D scanning in the city of Vancouver. Since 3D scanning has not yet made it into the collective public consciousness (this was before the movie Avatar was released after all!), the city officials were a bit confused at first, and did not quite know what to make of the curious request from the Québec City-area company. Finally, they decided to treat the operation as a movie shooting.

Julie located an electrician (required by the city) who supplied the hook-up to the city power grid. She also got a boom truck; it may not seem obvious at first, but the scanner has to be about 30 cm away from the surface to function properly, and the statue is 6 meters tall. Since neither Jérôme nor Mathieu can reach that high even on tip-toes (!), scanning the upper parts would require extra lift!

So on a chilly December morning, passers-by on English Bay were treated to a most unusual sight: men were first seen dotting the Inukshuk with small, round reflective stickers, and then they started pointing Wall-e shaped instruments at the Inukshuk. The team also set up a laser tracker to discreetly take in the area immediately surrounding the Inukshuk. According to the weather forecast, a storm was expected to roll in that very evening from the roaring Pacific. Jérôme and Mathieu worked fast and were able to complete their scan and clean up the area in less than 12 hours! That was fast!

Giving life to stone

Data in hand (well, in computer, actually), Jérôme and Mathieu slept like logs and got back the following day. We had our raw material.
Next, Louis-Philippe was put to work. While Jérôme worked on post-processing the 3D scan model, the tracker data was put to good use in creating the 3D environment for the short film.

A storyboard was set up, and a scenario written. Scanned models were integrated. Sounds were recorded; Julie wrote and recorded a short narrative in English and in French. Jérôme integrated the soundtrack for the film.

Eventually, creating the environment, laying out the movements, animating the Inukshuk, and putting it all together took over 200 hours by Louis-Philippe and Jérôme, with some help from Daniel Brown, another Applications Specialist. Without question, the most exhilarating part of the work was seeing the 3D environment take shape and spring to life on the computer screen. Louis-Philippe, Jérôme and Daniel did spectacular work, of which we are all very proud!

Why did we do it? It was certainly fun to stretch our legs and be creative. In our field of work, reverse engineering and inspection are the most common applications for our Handyscan 3D technology. We have been moving into the multimedia industry, and going the extra mile just might help show exactly how our scanners can be used by animation specialists.

Not to mention the most important reason for scanning an object.

Because it’s there.

Maxime Davignon, Scanning & Inspection Director
Manager for the Inukshuk Project

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

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