V6 - The Next Generation PLM Solutions
Over the past few years, Dassault Systemes' has been constantly reshaping and innovating its business and product lines in a number of markets. There's probably no Company on the planet that has done more to market PLM and the virtue of 'business process change' in engineering. The company has gone through almost constant change as its PLM vision has developed. Below is a summary of how Dassault Systemes key solutions brands fit into their overall V6 PLM 2 startegy.
Videos
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V6 PLM Solutions
V6 PLM Overview Video |
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ENOVIA V6 Overview
An introduction to ENOVIA V6 |
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Jaguar Land Rover deploying V6 PLM
JLR outlines V6 PLM deployment strategy. |
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Renault drives customer experience with V6
Short Customer Usage Overview |
The core brand is obviously Catia, the company's 3D product development system that plays a
major role in high-end automotive and aerospace design, as well as a number of other significant markets. There's the full Catia V6 version as well as Catia PLM Express bundles for small to mid-sized companies.
ENOVIA
The management portion of the company that manages collaboration, product structure and distribution. DS recognises that different industries have their own processes and flows and so has come up with a number of configurations for specific markets (aerospace, footwear and apparel, automotive, consumer packaged goods, semi-conductor etc.). In addition to the all-encompassing management system, Enovia SmarTeam is the management solution DS offers for small to medium companies.
DELMIA
Offers a suite of Digital Manufacturing tools to optimise and define manufacturing processes and production. This can be implemented for early process planning and assembly simulation, to modelling welding lines,
robot and cell programming. Again DS recognises a number of different market needs and has solutions for Aerospace, Automotive, Shipbuilding and Energy. There's also a 'Human' module to test ease of build, maintenance and operation.
SIMULIA
Is dedicated to producing realistic simulation and analysis tools for FEA and structural analysis on parts of assemblies (including composite parts). When simulation and analysis is combined with the virtual model, this reduces the need for physical prototypes and therefore cost.
3DVIA
3DVIA's mission is the democratisation of 3D, so that everyone can use it in their day to day lives, in applications or online. This in itself is a very broad area to cover and the product set and technologies the division has are equally diverse: 3DVIA Composer, a desktop authoring system for interactive product documentation (this is the result of acquiring a company called Seemage), 3DVIA Virtools for producing virtual worlds for customer experiences and simulation, 3DVIA MP for games developers and 3D Live, a lightweight 3D application along the lines of SketchUp. The division is also in charge of the 3DXML open format that DS has created. 
'V6 is PLM 2.0 and is what Web 2.0 was to the Web'. Having a new geometry engine and with Enovia technology embedded into the core application, distributed working is built-in, together with the ability to manage and share that IP anywhere. This is possible as Catia is no longer based on files, everything is based on a database, which is massively scalable, allowing perhaps up to 10,000 people to work on the same model. It's even possible for more than one engineer to work on the same part, as Catia can lock down individual features.
There's a new interface shared across the product range with the innovations seen in previous years all seem to have been implemented. Yes, there's a new kernel which took ten years to develop, a new interface and new applications like mould and schematic design but the one thing that DS can clearly show is the way it has enabled geographically challenged groups of engineers to work on the same large design simultaneously, collaborate, manage, simulate and in a distributed but controlled way.
