SolidWorks World 2019--Bringing 3DExperience to SolidWorks
Published on : Tuesday 30-11--0001
The 21st edition of SolidWorks World was held at Dallas, Texas in early February. Milton D’Silva reports.
It was a gathering of 6387 strong SolidWorks community – professionals, users, resellers, hobbyists and students – from all corners of the world, assembled in the largest hall of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Centre in downtown Dallas. The occasion was the General Session of the celebrated annual SolidWorks World, now in its 21st year – the premier annual event dedicated to the 3D design and engineering community.
Gian Paolo Bassi, CEO, SolidWorks/Dassault Systèmes, made a dramatic entry on the stage with a motorised wheelchair that was designed, tested and validated on SolidWorks and manufactured some time ago by Christian Bagg, a mountain biking and snowboarding enthusiast, paralysed waist down after an accident in 1996. Today Bagg can traverse the Canadian Rockies in this wheelchair, which is strong enough to withstand the rough trail. What was just a dream and a seed of possibility, took shape in the hands of Bagg, a mechanical engineer, thanks to the power and the potential of possibility unleashed by SolidWorks.
“This is where we come to get inspired…this represents people and technologies coming together to make a difference. This is the true meaning and purpose for all of us at SolidWorks and Dassault Systèmes. We want to inspire businesses and people to make a difference, to create products that can harmonise nature and life…a sustainable future,” said Bassi, who then made the first announcement of the event – the launch of 3DExperience.Works that brings to SolidWorks users the power of the Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience Platform. “Platform is the new thinking…we want to offer you this amazing concentration of tools, technologies, knowledge and knowhow,” he added.
3DExperience.Works allows SolidWorks to retain all its tools but also makes available to the users additional resources and capabilities that include:
- DelmiaWorks – another important announcement – an integrated combination of Manufacturing Execution and Enterprise Resource Planning, thanks to the recent acquisition of IQMS
- ENOVIA, a scalable set of PLM Services on the cloud, designed specifically for SolidWorks desktop users
- SIMULIA, advanced simulation capabilities covering all-physics and real-life scenarios, and
- Marketplace for Engineers, a service connecting businesses with skilled engineers to collaborate with on projects.
Later into the keynote, Bassi introduced the core team of Dassault Systèmes that will make 3DExperience.Works work – Gary Nemmers, CEO, IQMS (now DelmiaWorks); Stephane Declee, CEO, ENOVIA; David Holman, Vice President, SIMULIA R&D; and Florence Hu-Aubigny, Senior VP, R&D, 3DExperience Platform, who explained, well, how it works.
“There is something which is at the core what makes this community a vibrant community. It is innovation or the design at the centre of innovation. We believe the virtual world extends and improves the real world,” said Bernard Charlès, Vice Chairman & CEO of Dassault Systèmes, taking off from where Bassi left. Charlès traced the journey of the group from 1981 when it launched 3D Design with shapes, and graduated to 3D Digital Mock-Up (DMU) in 1989, before progressing to 3D PLM – Product Lifecycle Management – in 1999. Referring to DelmiaWorks, which is the post-acquisition name of IQMS, the leading manufacturing ERP software company, Charlès said the idea is to make ERP on design, which has been hitherto too 
expensive and too complex, very easy, adaptable and affordable to use for mid-market companies, improving collaboration, manufacturing efficiency and business agility needed to serve their customers successfully. “DelmiaWorks will do for ERP what SolidWorks did for the world of design in the last 22 years,” he said.
“As you can see, at Dassault Systèmes we have taken a very ambitious role to digitise the world – we do it for cars, trains, planes, and even cities, now,” said Charlès. “We are not in a product economy anymore, we are in an experience economy. What it means is the value to the citizens of what we do everyday is the real value of our contribution to sustainable innovation. That’s what 3DExperience is about,” he added.
Another announcement was the launch of SolidWorks xShape – the 3D subdivision modelling tool on the 3DExperience Platform, used for creating designs that require organic shapes with very smooth transitions. It is the second “xApp” in a portfolio from SolidWorks after xDesign that allows industrial designers, digital artists, and engineers to create innovative products in a new way. It runs fully in a browser, so no installation is necessary.
A very interesting keynote was delivered by Jim McKelvey – the well-known American glass artist, entrepreneur, businessperson and 
philanthropist and now an Independent Director of the St Louis Federal Reserve. Jim is the co-founder of Square together with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and together they launched the revolutionary small card reader Square that enables small businesses do business by offering them the easy way to accept card payments. In his keynote Jim explained how they came to design the card and the role SolidWorks played in its design.
Well, the final announcement was a surprise. This will be the last SolidWorks World event. However, it is not the end, but a new beginning with a new name, 3DExperience World, retaining all the features of SWW and adding a lot more. 3DExperience World 2020 will take place in Nashville, TN – USA from February 9-12, 2020.
The R&D Powerhouse
The figures are astounding – 6,700 employees, 41% of the total strength; 64 locations in 21 countries; and USD 0.6 bn expense base in 2017. That’s the R&D Department of Dassault Systèmes, headed by Dominique Florack, President R&D. This is the first time R&D got to host a General Session at the SolidWorks event on Day 2 – R&D Futures.
Manish Kumar, SolidWorks R&D Vice President, Dassault Systèmes, began his presentation by asking what is common to Boeing, Airbus and GE Aviation. Of course all three are aerospace companies, but all of them are now using the 3DExperience Platform, he said. “Aerospace industry was the first one to use CAD and leads the CAD industry; also the first one to use DMU and PLM and now the 3DExperience Platform, which has become the de facto standard in aerospace,” said Manish. “The 3DExperience Platform is not just for big companies. It is even useful for a company with just two people working in a garage to collaborate with each other. And for the first time in the history of CAD, the same platform is available for all the people at the same exact time. This is revolution in my view,” he added.
There is only one global R&D team for Dassault Systèmes, which comprises 12 different brands – each with its own CEO – together serving 11 industry verticals. “One R&D because it minimises the duplication of efforts, we work in the most efficient way together. Dassault Systèmes is perhaps one of the rare organisations where R&D is allowed to work on their dreams, exploring their fullest potential without worrying about how we are going to package things together in order to give you a product,” explained Manish. “Why is it that I believe we are the best design team that is going to deliver the best product? Because we are experts in design, experts in simulation, experts in manufacturing, experts in material science and it is not just one person who has all this expertise – it comes from all the brands.”
“We are going to harness the power of all the solutions that come from all the different brands and we will put simplicity and user experience at the core of our offerings and that offering will become 3DExperience.Works,” Manish concluded.
Captions
Pix1: Gian Paolo Bassi, CEO, SolidWorks/Dassault Systèmes. All photos courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.
Pix2: (L-R) Gary Nemmers, Stephane Declee, David Holman and Florence Hu-Aubigny at SWW2019.
Pix3: Bernard Charlès (right), Vice Chairman & CEO of Dassault Systèmes at the Partner Pavilion.
Pix4 in Box: Manish Kumar, SolidWorks R&D Vice President, Dassault Systèmes.
