Lockheed Martin’s advanced F35 fighter [Source: Pixabay]

Dassault Systèmes has landed a big customer: Lockheed Martin.

The aerospace giant has selected Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform for a huge new project. The project apparently involves the development of new helicopters and aircraft, but also involves integration.

Lockheed Martin and 3DEXPERIENCE

Dassault Systèmes explains:

“Lockheed Martin is deploying the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to support its digital engineering initiatives. Through this multi-year collaboration between the two companies, Lockheed Martin aims to build a digital thread that extends from design through manufacturing for its next generation airplanes and helicopters.

Lockheed Martin is using a variety of industry solution experiences based on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as part of a larger suite of digital engineering tools. The company’s Aeronautics and Rotary and Mission Systems business areas are utilizing the platform for 3D design software, 3D Digital Mock Up and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions in a comprehensive digital environment intended to enhance collaboration, agility and speed.”

This is quite interesting, as it seems to validate Dassault Systèmes’ integration concept.

Long ago, the foundation of Dassault Systèmes’ software was its flagship CAD product, SOLIDWORKS. This was and is a popular and highly-regarded 3D CAD system with plenty of options, plug-ins and features to address pretty much any industry’s specific needs.

The challenge for companies, however, is that a CAD system is only one (big) part of product development.

There are other aspects in the lifecycle of a product that must be addressed, such as testing, simulation, administration, manufacturing, tracking and process management. Having a good CAD system doesn’t solve the other issues, which are sometimes as large as or larger than the CAD challenge.

3DEXPERIENCE Integration

That’s where Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform comes in.

It includes modules for many of these functions, as they are often found as separate products from the company. But the interesting part is that the platform provides an integration between them so that it is possible to implement a true end-to-end lifecycle for product development.

While small companies or individual designers might find such concepts entirely not required, issues created by lack of integration are highly complex in larger organizations. In the past such integration was frequently done manually, involving a lot of manual work, third party connections and all of this could cause errors.

By including the integration directly in 3DEXPERIENCE, there is far less probability of error, and a much more speedy flow of information between points.

For a company like Lockheed Martin, which is distributed across multiple locations, departments and hundreds of people, this move seems like a natural step.

It’s possible the development of the new aircraft and helicopters could be significantly sped through the use of integrated software systems, and that alone could be quite valuable to the company.

Via Dassault Systèmes