Local product life-cycle management (PLM) specialist CNC Design Consultants (CDC) has teamed up with vehicle producer Optimal Energy in the design of the first South African electrical car, the Joule. The plug-in electric vehicle was conceived by Optimal Energy and has been refined by automotive and design company Zagato’s Total Design Centre. “CDC is working closely with Optimal Energy to ensure a quality design,” says CDC MD Igal Filipovski. The car will reportedly go into production in 2013 and is on display this month at the Geneva Motor Show, in Switzerland.

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Our Engineers have been to courses in the UK and we at CDC are now proud to be certified to sell you the latest technology and thinking on the market today. V6 is the future in technology and will help your business manage you data more efficiently, collaborate and communicate more effieciently as well as bring your business together from design, to sales, to production and through to your executives needing a top down view of happenings in the company.

As one of CDC’s largest clients it gives us pleasure to show the progress and speed at which Optimal Energy has grown over the past year. Here is a press release stating their move forward into the future.

Optimal Energy, South African car manufacturer, will develop Joule, Africa’s first battery-powered vehicle, with the V6 solutions from Dassault Systèmes.

Optimal Energy will rely on CATIA and ENOVIA V6 for product design and data management. As well as ENOVIA 3DLIVE, to overcome the distance relationship of suppliers and partners and to be able to collaborate on the same model in real time over the Internet.

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ENOVIA V6 a PLM Platform to Global Collaboration

Companies implementing a global engineering and manufacturing strategy are taking a hard look at how everyone, regardless of location or status, can collaborate across their PLM business processes. To solve this issue, ENOVIA V6 introduces the concept of “PLM online for all” that helps harness collective intelligence from business units, suppliers, and customers. This vision of “PLM online for all” is enabled in V6 by means of Web technologies. 

ENOVIA V6 is based on the Web technology principle of a n-tier architecture.  There are three primary tiers to the logical architecture, namely: data, application and presentation.  The data tier holds the application data (ENOVIA Database Server) and files (ENOVIA File Collaboration Server).  The application data acts as a single source of truth for all the information relevant to ENOVIA.  The second tier is the application tier, which handles the business logic and access to the database.  Last is the presentation tier where ENOVIA V6 is delivered to the user, over the Web.

A significant challenge in global collaboration is file access across multiple regions and continents due to the high bandwidth requirements for large files (like CAD data).  This is addressed in ENOVIA V6 through the use of the ENOVIA File Collaboration Server (FCS) architecture.  ENOVIA FCS allows a customer to deploy file servers closer to end users (ideally on their LAN, or high-speed WAN) for improved file transfer performance.  All the communication between the file server and the system or user (browser) is done securely through HTTPS.  The ENOVIA system automatically replicates files across file servers if the file at a local server is outdated.  This replication can occur on-the-fly as a user performs a download operation, or can be initiated proactively using background scripts.

The ENOVIA V6 engine identifies the location of the file and targeted FCS based on the mapping between the content being transferred, and the user’s default site configured in the system. For example, when Steve from London is trying to Check In a CAD file; the system knows to upload the file to the Bristol server close to Steve’s default site.  Alternately, if he is checking in a Microsoft Word document related to a project, the file would get Checked In to the Cambridge server location.

There are inherent advantages to a n-tier architecture as it is able to scale based on business needs.  Companies can start with a minimal setup with a single site and then grow into a multi-site environment with minimal changes to the ENOVIA V6 configuration.  With the use of Web architecture, product creation and collaboration is enabled for real-time, concurrent work across multiple remote locations with only a Web connection.  So a new employee in South Africa can access the ENOVIA V6 application hosted in New York and seamlessly start to collaborate with other employees and suppliers on different aspects of product design.

V6 n-tier architecture indeed delivers multiple benefits to the customer with secure global collaboration, scalability, enhanced file collaboration and system performance.  Please contact us for more information on ENOVIA V6.

Over 80% of 2009 Vehicles Debuting at Detroit Auto Show Designed in CATIA

Auburn Hills, Mich., January 13, 2009 – Dassault Systèmes (DS) (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced that CATIA, the company’s solution for virtual design, was used in the development of over 80 percent of the 24* introductory and concept vehicles making their world debut at the 2009 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) taking place at Cobo Hall in Detroit, January 11-25. Additionally, CATIA was utilized in the design of all NAIAS 2009 North American Car of the Year and 2009 North American Truck of the Year finalists. With the automotive industry under extreme duress and scrutiny, optimizing vehicle development processes to reduce cost and time to market without sacrificing creativity or quality are key goals.

CATIA, with its knowledgeware capability, is able to positively and significantly impact these areas. Through the use of CATIA’s automated design templates, designers can streamline and standardize the design process. This creates ‘free engineering’ time to invest in innovation and deliver additional benefits in each concurrent model that is based upon that set of templates. Knowledge is accumulated and stored in a single data base for real-time sharing. Changes in design specifications are automatically propagated across all involved disciplines to ensure that everyone is working with the most current data. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology is increasingly impacting design as new capabilities allow collaboration between all the involved parties from creators to collaborators to consumers. Studies show that there exists a strong correlation between a company’s ability to find new uses for information and its ability to innovate.

Today, many of the automakers across the world are using Dassault Systèmes’ PLM solutions, such as CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, SIMULIA, and 3DVIA. These solutions enable manufacturers to develop and optimize vehicle design and manufacturing processes in the virtual world to deliver higher quality products in a shorter time, at a reduced cost. The Dassault Systemes’ PLM portfolio offers increased engineering excellence, expanding PLM deeper into production cycles, accelerating PLM adoption for mid-size companies, broadening IP lifecycle management and further integrating the enterprise ecosystem. In addition, Dassault Systèmes’ DELMIA Automation virtual commissioning solution has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious 2009 Automotive News PACE Awards, recognized around the world as the industry’s symbol of innovation, technological advancement and business performance among automotive suppliers.