IBM and Dassault Systemes Announce CATIA Version 5 Release 9

Latest Release of PLM Product Engineering Solutions Enables Unparalleled Innovation and Efficiency with Breakthrough Product Morphing

Paris, France – June 11, 2002 - IBM and Dassault Systemes (NASDAQ: DASTY; Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) today announced the availability of CATIA Version 5 Release 9 (V5R9), the leading three-dimensional product life cycle management (3D PLM) solution for product design, creation, simulation and optimization. As part of the global 3D PLM offering, CATIA V5R9 represents a major milestone in the PLM space by delivering the set of business practices for breakthrough product morphing. Available worldwide on July 26, 2002, CATIA V5R9 delivers a total of 129 products – 11 new products and over major 87 product enhancements - for unparalleled product design.

 

“Product morphing” is a set of state-of-the-art business practices enabled by CATIA V5’s unique knowledgeware, relational design, process integration and PPR infrastructure, which automatically combine existing design definitions and/or templates, with new specifications to drive the regeneration of fully-engineered derivative product definitions.  By maximizing reuse of existing knowledge and experience, morphing gives customers the ability to reduce cycle times and increase their market responsiveness.

 

“The difference between success and failure in new products is more and more dependent on their innovation content.” said Dominique Florack, Executive Vice President of Dassault Systemes. “The paradox in today’s development processes is that most of the money and effort is invested revisiting decisions that were made for previous programs. Struggling for percentage improvements does not solve this paradox. Morphing-based processes eliminate this redundancy, leveraging digital knowledge models that adapt to new specifications and automate routine decision-making. Since knowledgeware is natively implemented within the V5 infrastructure, we now can work seriously with customers on turning dreams such as the “one-year car” into a reality.”

 

CATIA V5R9 Major Highlights

CATIA V5R9 offers a wide range of new capabilities to make product morphing a reality and to significantly improve the efficiency of product design and simulation across engineering processes:

 

• Major enhancements to 87 products for design and manufacturing process definition in areas such as cast, forged, and molded parts, and automotive body-in-white.
• Eleven new applications providing expanded process coverage for the consumer goods, industrial machinery, aerospace, industrial equipment systems, and shipbuilding sectors.
  Enhanced relational design methodology and support of collaborative multi-CAD product development processes.
• New product, process, resource (PPR) technologies to strengthen CATIA-ENOVIA integration and improve the interaction between numerical control (NC) manufacturing processes and product design definitions.
• New capabilities to maximize knowledge capture and reuse through system- and subsystem-level design templates.
• Extended openness within the 3D PLM space with a total of 18 third-party V5 applications.
  

 

Value for the Customer

CATIA V5 is the product-engineering solution offered within the 3D PLM portfolio. 3D PLM enables companies to optimize their business Processes for engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and support, using Collaborative Workspaces to share a common product, process and resource model (PPR). With PPR, companies can capture, share and reuse Knowledge throughout the product lifecycle. The open CAA (Component Application Architecture) V5 allows extension of this solution to - and integration within - multiple enterprise environments.

 

Process-Centric

CATIA V5R9 accelerates reengineering and optimization of primary industry processes such as automotive body-in-white, cast, forged, and molded parts by providing 87 major application enhancements to part design, drafting, analysis, tolerance management, and generative shape design. All product design improvements are based on a specification-driven, or “generative” approach, and enable customers to rapidly create new products, explore variants, and manage design changes within a digital product morphing environment.

Eleven new applications extend process coverage in the consumer goods, industrial machinery, aerospace, industrial equipment systems, and shipbuilding domains. CATIA V5R9’s Healing Assistant 1 product, for example, delivers increased reliability with improved topology and geometric accuracy for imported mold parts. Weld Design 1 completes the fabrication and assembly process for industrial machinery. Tubing Diagrams 2 provides specification-driven system processes that link logical and physical design for automotive and aerospace customers. Finally, Aerospace Sheetmetal Design 3 provides dedicated design capabilities for hydro-pressed and break-formed sheetmetal parts.

 

3D Collaborative Workspace

CATIA V5R9 offers improved collaboration and change management throughout the enterprise by linking product knowledge within relational design methodology. For instance, the ability to share design parameters by explicit publication at any level of a product structure facilitates collaboration, captures design intent by defining the interface, and provides automatic reconciliation of parameters and dependent geometry or constraints during component replacement or version update.

This latest release also provides enhanced capabilities for working with multi-CAD data, thereby facilitating collaboration within a heterogeneous environment. Other improvements include standard interfaces, consistent parts catalog management with TeamPDM 1, the new Healing Assistant 1 product, and V4 integration enhancements.

 

PPR

New PPR reconciliation technologies make a company’s PLM environment more flexible by permitting file-based CATIA projects to be integrated with ENOVIA at any time. CATIA V5R9 supports virtual product data management by reinforcing the combined use of CATIA and ENOVIA through standardized parts catalogs and integration of concurrent digital mock-up (DMU) application data around a common PPR model. CATIA V5R9 improves interaction between NC manufacturing applications and product design definitions to facilitate rapid change propagation.

 

Knowledge

By enabling the capture and reuse of predefined product design templates, CATIA V5R9 acts as the cornerstone for full morphing implementation. System-wide knowledge specifications now extend from simple features to the entire assembly level, thereby expanding the opportunities for development of automated, “morphable”, designs. The application of product morphing has been shown to deliver design time and costs reductions of 50% or more in project critical processes by factors not previously achieved.

 

CAA V5

31 key players in various areas of PLM expertise support the open nature of CATIA V5R9 and its underlying architecture, which includes analysis and simulation, electrical, and manufacturing processes, and such specialized fields as optical design. With unparalleled development speed and quality, these partners have built a total of 18, ready-to-use V5 applications focused on accelerating product design, simulation and NC manufacturing for the customer. CATIA users have been able to benefit directly from the native integration and consistent performance afforded by these V5 applications.