Intelligent Engineering, Enterprise PLM and ‘Best Practice’ Processes: The Golden Bullet for Automotive OEMs

Last week my colleague picked up her new car. The excited discussions that followed, as the car’s features were discussed, did not focus on the efficient yet responsive engine, the sleek and dynamic lines of its bodywork or the comfort of its ergonomically designed seating – it was the fact that it has a Wi-Fi Hotspot. This wasn’t just another sign that I’m getting old, it’s more of a wakeup call that the intense focus on what I used to look for in a new car has been consigned to mere hygiene factors by the emerging generations of new car buyers. This is a factor that is being designed into modern engineering by the most successful automotive OEMs.

There is a growing list of trends that need to be tracked and considered to ensure success 5-10 years in the future, for example:

• The future of the Internal Combustion Engine
• Environmental requirements together with Hybridisation and Electrification
• Infotainment and vehicle customisation
• Autonomous, driverless mobility
• The viability of step change technology breakthroughs and marginal developments

The initial connection to the market and the management and processing of the resulting data is the first component of your Enterprise PLM, the first step to best practice. Interestingly the latest technology is enabling both existing OEM’s to modernise their systems and new entrants into the market with a clean sheet approach, who are not compromised by a ‘that’s not the way we do things here’ mantra.

As Olivier Sappin, vice president of transportation and mobility industry for Dassault Systèmes has said of OEM’s, “they have to rethink engineering, eliminate silos, develop closer partnerships with suppliers, and integrate high-tech electronics.” This is now happening within a predominately digital environment.

As far as the technology is concerned the latest iteration of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform delivers cost effective and targeted packages that solve real automotive issues. Packaged and attractively priced software bundles have been developed specifically for targeted sectors of the automotive market to promote collaboration between employees, partners and suppliers, gather consumer feedback and trends, shorten product development cycles and ultimately satisfy evolving customer needs.

It’s not just a software solution. A successful business system needs to integrate the very best ‘industry independent’ processes and deploy them together as an Intelligent Engineering system. Achieving this requires a partner who understands your industry, unique business drivers, how to deliver the software benefits and has the experience to deploy best practice processes. This will then produce an optimised business model able to cope with the challenges of the global marketplace.

Leading companies are driving digitisation of the entire engineering environment and combining this with the intelligent application of optimised processes. This is the value that Intelligent Engineering represents.