Difficult times are battering Manufacturing.
The pandemic disrupted manufacturers’ just-in-time supply chains and human-staffed production lines, leading to empty grocery shelves and global scrambles for medical supplies. Sustainability issues grow more pressing day by day, with employees, consumers and regulators demanding rapid progress. Meanwhile, the workforce skills that Manufacturing needs to address these challenges are in short supply.
Combined, it’s a perfect storm for Manufacturing. But it can be survived. In the four downturns since 1985, one in seven companies grew its sales and profits. How did they succeed while others faltered? Because, as BCG observes, “companies that have purposefully developed capabilities to tackle ambiguity and unpredictability — in a word, resilience — are most likely to thrive.”
Analysts agree that today, business resilience is enabled by “digital transformation.” And thousands of resilient industry-leading manufacturers trust their enterprise and value-network transformations to Dassault Systèmes and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
The R&D team at Dassault Systèmes works shoulder-to-shoulder with our Manufacturing customers. Although we couldn’t foresee today’s convergence of challenges 10 years ago, when we conceived of the platform, we heard our customers’ concerns about poor visibility. Information silos. Mismatched skills and jobs. And we realized that manufacturers needed something very different than what our industry was offering.
And so we created the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to connect all the dots among corporate processes, revealing a total picture and addressing issues at their roots. We re-architected our brand applications to contribute to and benefit from the platform and to work collaboratively, from sensing changes in market demand to conceiving and operating factories as interactive “virtual worlds.”
This ability to visualize, virtualize and test ideas in scientifically accurate virtual worlds is the 3DEXPERIENCE platform’s differentiator, allowing users to imagine and evaluate more options before they act. Testing virtual products in virtual worlds also empowers engineers to ensure they perform as expected in different conditions, and to pair them with a variety of services to create and virtually test end-user experiences.
Because the platform captures company knowledge and know-how as it is created and used, it empowers both today’s and tomorrow’s workers with the experience of generations. And because it is architected for the cloud, the platform enables instant collaboration across the enterprise and beyond, supporting suppliers, partners, home-based and remote employees as if they were on premise.
The pandemic is a sobering example of why we challenge our customers to “platform your business.” We urge this not because the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is what we sell, but because the platform is what Manufacturing businesses need to remain resilient in a chaotic, fast-shifting world.
