3DEXPERIENCE Community Feedback
It was a little while ago when I wrote “4IR: The Landscape, The Drivers & Opportunities” and it was a long article (maybe 30min read — www.linkedin.com/pulse/4ir-landscape-drivers-opportunities-andrew-sparrow/)
Part of the blog project was to research customer and implementor experiences of installation and use of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform; a solution I’m a big believer in and like to work closely with 3DS in helping deliver in my own small way.
Today, apparently there are just over 3000 3DEXPERIENCE experienced individuals around the world today and I am delighted to say that I have the honor of being connected to the majority of them. There are so many projects underway, enjoying a journey full of twists and turns.
I thought it a good idea to reach out to the community and seek their opinions on the platform; be that good, bad or indifferent and a big thank you to all who responded. I asked three questions:
On your recent 3DEXPERIENCE project, what was the main business benefit hoping to be gained from the platform?
What was the greatest challenge in installing the platform?
In your experience, how would improve the existing 3DEXPERIENCE Solution?
Answers came in thick and fast across the customers, systems integrators and some of the Dassault people.
Here’s the 1st question I asked:
1. On your recent 3DEXPERIENCE project, what was the main business benefit hoping to be gained from the platform?
Across the many answers I was able to summarise the answers into the following:
Build Internal Best Practice:
the platform gives a central point for everyone to track and trace methods, styles and approaches across the organisation in order to understand future best practices.
Improve Internal Collaboration & Trust In The Process Of Innovation:
a platformization approach helps to breakdown the silos and brings multi-functional and purpose teams together in order to collaborate in a trusted, single-source-of-truth platform.
Design & Manufacture Faster:
ultimately, the platform is there to help collaborate across the ecosystem in order to design and manufacture better, smarter and more flexible products.
2. What was the greatest challenge in installing the platform?
Nothing unsurmountable but all challenging in order to breakthrough into new ways of working & producing:
1. People Change/ Business Process/ Training in 3DX: By far the most common challenge surrounded people & getting them to adapt in what they do each day. Shifting an enterprise culture and the personalities within has to be always the greatest & the first focus of the organisation. While the 3DEXPERIENCE is relatively intuitive, everyone needs different levels of training & in different ways
2. Server Installation: understanding the technical & infrastructure aspects of the platform remains one of the challenges
3. Data Migration & Multi-CAD Integration: most enterprises wish to wrap in the legacy product data that can go back many years & in different formats/structures, combined with multi-CAD softwares. Pulling those together in a fast & agile implementation remains a great workload for the team
4. Install Speed:I think most of us have learnt it’s about empowering the workforce to new ways of working in bit size chunks & building momentum through quick wins. Agile, Scrum, DevOps needed to bring success to the business & platform
3. In your experience, how would improve the existing 3DEXPERIENCE Solution?
No one or no solution is perfect and I’ve heard many arguments for & against the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform for Product Innovation; be that integration issues, complexity of install, the Enovia PLM versus others etc etc.
However, what I know is the Dassault Systemes’ drive to be at the forefront of the Customer Experience/Expectation Economy is unrivaled. It’s that drive that has acquired some of the very best independent solutions from around the world that Dassault is bundling beneath the attractive and user friendly hood of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. Today it can sometimes feel like a “mish mash” of solutions that demands support from some of the brightest people from Velizy and around the world in order for it to fit your business, however I’ll choose 1st movers with a strongly aligned passion, preparedness to work with me to meet my goals and determination to learn best practice and share over anything.
That’s what I’m seeing from DS and some of their partners.
Looking out for or waiting for the perfect solution to come along is always the enemy of delivery and so agility and speed in installing the platform has often led Dassault to win the big tenders.
From our recent community survey we found there to be 4 main opportunities for advancement in both the solution and installation:
Implementation Approaches
Theories, frameworks and methodologies are great, but really there’s no escaping the need for “battle scars”. Trying, failing and learning rely of course on the determination to win-through in the end, and finding people who have been there and learnt the quirkiness of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform is a good start.
What’s important is to document the experiences, to build up a list of “what ifs” and “what’s next” in order to quickly create the Formula for Success.
Without talking too much about Agile, most often it’s this speed to empowering the business that’s needed asap on installation. Sprinting to mini successes that can then be scaled, builds momentum and customers are looking for how to achieve these from integrators.
Intuitivity
[Degree of the effort rate required by a user in using a product for the first time]
There’s no doubt using the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform is one of the most intuitive in the market, however our survey often requested more training was needed in using it beyond the compass and that it wasn’t always as intuitive as people would like.
In my conversations with Velizy (Dassault Systemes’ HQ) it’s very apparent that the various solution teams are constantly focused on the user experience and improving our natural approach to usage.
Configuration & Change Management
As the consumer world demands not only smarter and faster delivered products, it’s the ability to mass personalise that’s fast becoming the expectation.
As part of the 3DEXPERIENCE Solution, the PLM and CAD are the tools to automate the management of product data to make productive use of the design and data parts. The automation of data comes from a set of rules embedded in the original designs, however it remains difficult to change or recreate these rules later as they are not contained within either of the CAD or PLM tools. With a Modular
PLM Architecture, these rules are created and documented ahead of time, especially given product personalization is today and will be more and more relevant in the 4IR, adapting this is critical.
Be ready as this will be one of the main tasks to adapt to us the changing customer.
Customer Marketing & Supplier Integration for Collaboration
To initiate and prove the MVP, to learn from the “field of play” means the extraction of data from the customer and suppliers and most probably from the CRM, SRM & SCM Applications.
One of the biggest demands moving forward is the ability to integrate Customers and Suppliers into the Product Innovation Platform for the betterment of product and service design.
www.linkedin.com/pulse/4ir-landscape-drivers-opportunities-andrew-sparrow/
#plm #3dexperience #3ds #delmia #enovia #catia