Very recently, Dassault Systèmes showcased the power of its 3DEXPERIENCE Platform at the 12th Edition of DefExpo 2022 in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. The company demonstrated the application of its 3DEXPERIENCE Platform in the Aerospace and Defense industry to harness virtual technologies for driving real-world innovation, productivity and profitability. The Platform enables social and collaborative interactions, 3D modelling, simulation and optimisation, and information intelligence.
Manufacturing Today caught up with Azmathullah Mohammed – Director, Customer Solution Experience, Dassault Systemes, India, at the DefExpo 2022 to learn more about Dassault Systèmes’s endeavours in empowering the defence and manufacturing industry through exponential innovations.
Azmath has over two decades of professional work experience in technical, project delivery and leadership roles across different industries. As Director, Customer Solution Experience, India, Azmath is responsible for sustaining and growing Dassault Systèmes’s customer base in India and ensuring faster adoption of the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform across industries, academia and government.
Azmath spoke about the modernisation of defence and Dassault Systèmes’s role, “We’ve been working with many organisations around the world, especially in product innovation–how the companies who want to innovate, who wants to change their way of working, who wants to transform digital solutions. Now coming to the aspect of modernisation, modernisation calls for a lot of aspects like product innovation—how to work towards ‘first time right product’, how to reduce time to market, how to manage the waste, so that companies are sustainable and contribute to the sustainability agenda. And how do we ensure that products are well maintained through their life cycle—all of these aspects will come as part of modernisation. Dassault Systèmes has a lot of solutions and offerings around these aspects to ensure that these companies adopt and address all the points I have highlighted. Our 3D Experience Platform is the solution that helps connect all these dots and ensure that as the companies move towards these modernisation aspects.
Moreover, if you look specifically at the aerospace domain, Dassault Systèmes has been the pioneer. We are working with all the major aerospace companies in the world. We have been part of the biggest technology provider and contributor; as a scientific and technology company, we have been helping them to go through the journey of modernisation.
Dassault Systèmes’s new industry experience for suppliers in Aerospace & Defense, called Engineered to Fly, focuses on the industry-specific solution to help customers address their exact needs while also addressing the needs of the specific industry. The Platform is a state-of-the-art solution running on a robust database which allows cross disciplines to interact over the internet securely. Azmat tells us more about this Platform.
“The offerings that we have classified are for specific industries. That’s why we call it industry service industry solution experiences. And by name, you can understand our primary objective is ensuring the user experience. So we have specific offerings industry-wise. Engineered to fly is one of the offerings as an industry solution experienced primarily addressing the small and medium business businesses who want to ensure their profitability, and increase their adoption of the technology and also ensure the right business process changes that they can take through right from the bidding to the delivery. So this particular solution is more focused towards small and medium business enterprises. The objective is to see how they can quickly adapt and replicate the different aspects. So it’s more focused on that area and also helps it connect dots between the different aspects of the business—specific systems engineering aspects, various aspects towards project management, and the different aspects of design. And then show the right adoption and ensure the business profitability through this process.
Azmath also threw light on the virtual twin experience enabling defence modernisation. “We have been doing a lot of work around this. In the current dynamics and the situation where sustainability is becoming the key for every company, virtual twins is one of the key factors that will help to be sustainable. The virtual twins help to model the complete aspect of the lifecycle, validate the real-world scenarios, and help reduce the wastage and the physical validations we do. So virtual twins help to optimise and validate from design to virtual validation to understanding what is the middle material reduction that we can ensure, what is the different validations that we perform, and how we ensure the reduction in time to market so there are different aspects which covers what we call as the lifecycle of the product.
Innovations by Dassault for empowering the defence industry
We are pioneering in offering the right solutions, especially in the aerospace industry. One of the aspects while catering to the digital manufacturing space, Dassault is now focusing is two different solutions around manufacturing–operations management to ensure the Smart Manufacturing, practice of the future and how manufacturing goes to the next level. So that it also encompasses the maintainability aspects of the products. Much focus is also happening in the MRO space, maintenance, repair and overhaul of the aerospace segment. And also have specific industry experience solutions and offerings to cater to the manufacturing areas. So there’s lot of innovation to ensure that the there’s the right connectivity between design to simulation to manufacturing, and also ensure it goes to the right operations and maintenance as an MRO in this industry.
So how is Dassault helping improve engineering productivity and reduce the development time between 40% and 60%? Azamth responded, “The core area here in this context is the concurrent engineering and collaborations. Traditionally, we’ve seen a lot of gaps in the way that the correct information and the data are moved from design to simulation to manufacturing. We focus on how we have all these domains of the product development cycle connected to a single data source so that the work is not repeated. And all these domains are well connected, like from the beginning. And that’s where we offer a single source of data to our finished end platform, which enables concurrently to understand the dependencies between design, virtual validation and manufacturing. And this will help to improve productivity, reduce the time for product innovation, and ensure that you adhere to the project timelines and schedule and ensure the product’s quality. The primary objective is to bring all the domains together under a single banner and have a single data source across these domains. So that’s how we can get to those efficiencies and the percentage improvements you look for.
Bringing in a higher degree of collaboration between different defence actors
Collaboration is something which is the core of the whole solution that we offer. If you look at the collaboration from the customer side, the customers have to collaborate with their suppliers—it could be design suppliers or manufacturers or suppliers in tooling. So collaboration is the key for us. Collaboration is one of our core areas as part of our solution offering. Now also in the overall industry, how we are trying to do and how we contribute to this collaboration. I will take the example of BoostAeroSpace SAS in Europe, where Dassault Systèmes has been involved in creating a consortium covering the different aerospace players across the European region. We have created a centre of excellence where they share the knowledge, collaborate, and understand the various aspects that can be learned and replicated and Dassault Systèmes has contributed to that particular consortium to happen.
In India, we already had a sort of centre of excellence where we have different players in the MSME market come together and utilise the facility to collaborate with academic institutions and other players in the market and help each other in the context of product innovation and ensure how they can replicate the learnings from each other.
About managing growing complexities with Model-based systems engineering (MBSE)
When it comes to airspace, systems engineering becomes very critical. You have to manage different systems—electrical systems, hydraulic systems etc.—so model-based systems engineering is the key focus area of Dassault Systèmes. As part of the product innovation, the planning and how you want to manage the systems become the key from the beginning. We do that as the model as the centre – that is why we call it model-based system engineering. The key aspect that comes as part of model-based learning is to have specific requirements managed through the physical products that you design, the logical relationship and the functional connectivity that you establish. By modelling the systems, we ensure this connectivity and look at how the dependencies across the systems are well understood. This becomes very critical. Whatever the engagement we do, this model-based systems engineering is the core aspect of what we do and we bring this as one of the key aspects when we engage with the customer.
On frontier technologies Dassault is investing in for accelerating Manufacturing Processes
We are working with many of India’s organisations, looking forward to innovating and aligning to our Atmanibhar and making India strategy. This calls for change in the thought process of different customers in terms of how do we leverage the players around, how do we collaborate, and how do we establish partnerships so that the technology and the right adoption of best practices that are happening and adoption of the business process that they take up. Earlier the case was different—we used to have only the licensed design used to come and people used to manufacture. But now, it is all about understanding the complete business cycle and clarifying every aspect. So in this context, one of the aspects is the kind of focus that Dassault Systèmes has established in the manufacturing domain. Also, Dassault Systèmes’s Platform enables collaboration with different partners. The best practices sharing that they do in the context of supplier collaboration and how the suppliers can be on one single Platform and our specific offering on Cloud eases this whole aspect into collaboration with the different players in the market. We have a cloud offering, enabling MSME companies to be the new market players or startups.
We are working with many of India’s organisations, looking forward to innovating and aligning to our Atmanibhar and making India strategy. This calls for change in the thought process of different customers in terms of how do we leverage the players around, how do we collaborate, and how do we establish partnerships so that the technology and the right adoption of best practices that are happening and adoption of the business process that they take up. Earlier the case was different—we used to have only the licensed design used to come and people used to manufacture. But now, it is all about understanding the complete business cycle and clarifying every aspect. So in this context, one of the aspects is the kind of focus that Dassault Systèmes has established in the manufacturing domain. Also, Dassault Systèmes’s Platform enables collaboration with different partners. The best practices sharing that they do in the context of supplier collaboration and how the suppliers can be on one single Platform and our specific offering on Cloud eases this whole aspect into collaboration with the different players in the market. We have a cloud offering, enabling MSME companies to be the new market players or startups.
Upskill for adoption to Dassault Systèmes’s platforms
Skilling the future workforce is one of the key areas of Dassault Systèmes. We have already partnered with different companies and government agencies to set up the Center of Excellence to ensure that the people coming out of college are skilled and can be readily absorbed in the industry. The Center of Excellence has collaborated with agencies like TIDCO—where the core objective is to help MSMEs leverage this as an activity centre and help engineers get trained on the specific industry-specific aspects, and develop their domain skills.