Mobile phone can simplify multimedia infrastructure of vehicle: Dassault

Dassault Systèmes recently held the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum 2020 India. It provided relevant insights and updates about the business strategy globally, along with its replication in India, by connecting to global and India leaders, such as, Bernard Charles, Vice Chairman, CEO, Dassault Systèmes , Florence Verzelen, EVP, Industry, Marketing, Global Affairs, Workforce of the Future, Dassault Systemes and Deepak NG, MD, India, Dassault Systèmes .

Speaking at the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum 2020 India, Florence Verzelen, Executive Vice President, Industry, Marketing, Global Affairs, Workforce of the Future, Dassault Systemes, said: "We are missing India very much. We used to be coming to India, at least twice a year. It is our favorite country. We know very well some of you and it's very difficult for us to be stuck in France today when we have be should be with all of you.

Florence Verzelen, Executive Vice President, Industry, Marketing, Global Affairs, Workforce of the Future, Dassault Systemes

“So, I hope all of you and your family are doing very well. The Covid-19 situation, in India, particularly, as of now, India is the second-largest hit country. You’ve seen a lot of crisis on your front - minus 67% of retail sales in June, 23% unemployment in April, car sales have been reduced and it is very hard for India now. This is the reason why at Dassault Systemes, we want to stay close and help you. This is exactly what my talk is about at 3DEXPERIENCE FORUM."

What should we do in case of a crisis of the scale of Covid-19, and how the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can unlock incredible value? There are five things to be done in such a situation. First and foremost thing is to protect your employees. For all of us and other industry players, all employees are our most precious assets. Health crisis as the size of Covid-19, you need your employees to come to the factory to work because a factory cannot open at our homes or if there are ways for you to make sure that your employees can work from home.

In both cases, we have developed solutions to help customers and employees to continue working. In factories, we have developed a simulation to make sure that Covid-19 does not propagate into factories, where you should put employees to ensure their safety.

This is the first step taken, and they can continue to produce, because India needs production of necessities and food. We can provide you with the solutions to make it safe and in case your employees are not necessary on the shop floor, then we have managed to make available for all of our Indian customers with cloud solutions.

These solutions enable then to continue to do their work from home. This is what we have done for the automotive, aerospace, industrial equipment sectors, and successfully. General Aeronautics is a very good example of that.

This is the first imperative in case of a crisis to protect employees and the second imperative is to maintain financial health. We need to make sure our industry, or company survive. It's not easy! We have fewer revenues, increased procurement cost, customers deferring purchases. To take a meaningful decision, we have to build scenarios.

And to do that, the 3DEXPIERINCE platform can help you to do that. Thanks to NETVIBES and EXALEAD you can discover what's happening around you.

You can also see weak signals in order to have visibility to decide if it's too high, then negotiate some agreements with your suppliers, giving customers, an incentive to make advance payments, asking them to extend your payment terms. In case of weak signals on the market that allow you to take a high decision and to build right scenarios. The second imperative is to maintain financial health to survive.

The third imperative is about sales and marketing. Unlike last year, we have to develop new kind of experiences. We have to make virtual experiences as enjoyable as possible. Some of our customers like ABB managed to create 3D assets, thanks to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform in order for their customer to experience their products in a better and easy way of seeing it. And thanks to that ABB has been able to increase their size, even during COVID. This is third imperative- adapt your sales and marketing.

There is also a fourth imperative: to clean and safeguard the supply chain. In India, not all states have been locked down at the same time, not all factories have been closed at the same time. It is another challenge for the industry and if you look at the car production. The car is made of 15,000 parts. If just one part is missing, the production will stop. If just one factory of one supplier cannot operate, you cannot produce anymore.

At Dassault Systemes, we have developed a solution for our customers. What we have done, thanks to our DELMIA QUINTIQ solution, we have been able to give to our customers the visibility on their supply chain and linked with NETVIBES EXALEAD gets a weak signal that allows you to find an alternative as a high in advance to be in a position to continue production. This is the fourth imperative to maintain, clean, and safeguard the supply chain.

Last, but not least, fifth imperative help the ecosystem. In a crisis like Covid-19, there is no single winner. We want our company to survive, but we want the company to survive because the economy will only be able to recover if enough of us managed to continue to grow. So, as much as we invest in our customer, at Dassault Systemes, we also decided to invest in India, for India. We work with governments like Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, to make sure that we provide our services on skill development online.

Not only for students, who want to continue to study, but also for professionals to upskill during the lockdown. We have partnered with the Government of India in supporting a Drug Discovery Hackathon 2020. We have mentioned Inali, we have thousands of examples of that case, for example, Sajanand Medical used SIMULIA for ventilator development. Ipca laboratories have been able to hump up production of hydroxichloroquine thanks to 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
Design and 3D printed test shields in Chennai, to give some ecosystem and such as some of the many projects, we have done with India to safeguard to the workforce of India. So, this is what my talk is about today, how to manage in a crisis of the scale of COVID. There are 5 imperatives:

* Protect your employees
* Maintain financial aids
* Adopt sales and marketing
* Clean, and safeguard the supply chain
* Help the ecosystem.

All of this is possible with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. I’m convinced it can be the catalyst and enabler of India’s recovery. India is very hit right now, but, I'm confident and content because there are signs of recovery. I'm talking to many customers in India, and some of them in automotive and mobile phone industries have already told us that they have started production and unemployment has decreased by presently 8%. There is also a huge hope in the industry, academia, government that India will be the producer of the COVID vaccine, not only for India but for the world.

India is incredible, resilient and I like to finish by quoting Dr Abdul Kalam. In India, when we tackle obstacles we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience, we did not know yet. And this is only when we are faced with failure we realise the life that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them. India is resilient and country of Abdul Kalam and India will rise from this Covid-19 crisis is stronger than ever.

Bernard Charles, Vice Chairman, CEO,Dassault Systèmes, and Florence Verzelen, EVP, Industry, Marketing, Global Affairs, Workforce of the Future, Dassault Systemes, addressed the media on the sidelines of the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum 2020 India.

Reducing risk in Automotive Sector

Bernard said: The automobile sector at large is under tremendous pressure due to the pandemic but also to structural transformation across the world. People are more concerned about sustainability, pollution, the CO2 emission challenge, which is clearly a major change. It’s creating an entire review of the product portfolio for each of the big players around the globe. With electric vehicle also growing and those techniques like hydrogen. Even the copy of combustion engines are going to continue to be there. We have improved techniques to basically reduce pollution.

The product portfolio of each company is evolving with electro mobility with vehicle simplification. I will summarize the way I see the future of many of the mobility systems. Most probably going to be based on skateboards with different bodies to provide multi-passenger city transportation. Last-mile delivery simplification and with advancement in battery technology. When you look at the average distance of each vehicle on smarter, connected vehicle to guide and increase safety. If you look at the current vehicles, they are rather complex and they can be simplified.

The flexibility to use a common chassis, common power, electrical power platform for multiple vehicles is there and is there for long term. We’re with most of those startups coming up with a type of equipment. It applies to two and three-wheelers, lighter vehicles, heavier vehicles and buses. In China, in electromobility, each time the bus stop, the bus will recharge. You can basically create a great autonomy for city buses.

We already know this project. It's a new material to have a light vehicle, new materials for advanced battery systems, a new architecture for the vehicle and new simplification for the user interface.

In India, I see a lot of people on a mobile phone connecting in the country very quickly. With the mobile phone, we can simplify the multimedia infrastructure of a vehicle to make it at a lower cost. In the case of Canoo, you just plug your mobile on the dashboard and you'll get almost everything you need.

It's highly simplified, and has the capacity to share. We are in all those innovative projects in India. We can help continue to develop frugal engineering and frugal manufacturing techniques using more of the digital way that India’s workforce can really use and take advantage of those. The challenge is to make sure our partners in India, no matter where they are, understand that the platform is changing everything.

We believe, and ultimately, our partner will not need CRM. They will not need Slack, and they will not need many of the tools they use to run their business because the platform is connecting us, our users, our companies and the partners together in one what we call loop, infinite relationship loop.

Simplification, agility and capacity for inclusiveness on new science at the core to create innovation that's ensure where I believe India can play it big.

Demand for EVs in India

Where EV can play a good role, a big role is more in congested areas. If we can find ways to use the battery, both at home and in the vehicle, and be able to charge those batteries at a time where the network is less on demand, i.e., during the night or so. Basically, a vehicle can become a cell in a global network of energy.

India, where there is huge infrastructure issues related to power infrastructure especially, could take advantage of the current disadvantage to really use in a more versatile way, the capacity of battery or mobility on home. This will come progressively. I don't see any reason why Indian companies innovating a lot to breakthrough, not on the battery technology itself, but on the experience in your own daily life. You have a game to play there. We'll see, like it is happening, but I think that there is really something that could be worthwhile to investigate.

Readiness of India in manufacturing 

Bernard Charles, said: We have seen an incredible dynamic in Indian universities to adopt the new digital way to create curricular competency centres to really train the new generation and make them agile with this kind of techniques to imagine new solution and then be able to produce them in a bigger way at a low cost. I was impressed last year when we had the India Forum to see the number of startups that were creating new solutions in sectors, which are, consider today as circulating.

There is still a lot that can be invented to simplify our life on simplified products. India is well positioned to play that card. With the evolution of degree education on innovation centres, we work with different government across India to really use the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to reveal the capacity. Don't try to do what the other country has been doing. You can find the India way and it's time to do it.

Improving localization levels and developing new products

Florence Verzelen further added that Indian can be self-reliable, but it can also be more important for the rest of the world. There are different ways in which Dassault Systemes is helping.

First way is: we are working with universities to be a workforce of the future. This is extremely important for us in India. If we want to see innovation in India, if we want to see new product development in India, we need new workforce. We need to work with university and startups. It's one of the first priority of Dassault Systemes, that is, partnering with universities, creating the Centres of Excellence, and making sure it holds a quality of experience based learning and I'm only talking about experience-based learning, not learning.

Experience-based learning allow you to experience innovation and therefore, develop a product. Another thing we do is to help companies to collaborate. We are also doing that with our centre of innovation.

Companies from Indian ecosystem meet and hear new business development ideas. This is extremely important if you want to create local solution. Last, but not the least, with DELMIA QUINTIQ, we find for Indian companies to intensify some other Indian suppliers, alternative to suppliers out of India, and make them part of their supply chain. It's extremely important the ˜Make in India program will help its economy.

India is not only becoming more autonomous, it is also becoming more important to the world. What we're seeing now is head back between US and China is that more and more companies are choosing to leave China to localise production in India. It's extremely important for India and I know that it's organising Make in India, because it's going to allow India to come up with some very efficient domains. It's going to be the future of new domains of excellence in India.

Update on Covid Trials

Most of the clinical trials take the stand of the current companies working on a vaccine for Covid-19 globally. There is a lot of attention on that right now. Its in big scale! We collaborated with Moderna and they are now in phase three. But, so are a lot of other players. Astra is using our platform to do the clinical trial. I think they couldn't do the advances they have done without it early.

Also, we are helping them with what we call is, Synthetic Control Arms. Synthetic Control Arms is the capacity of our platform based on the data of 20 years of experiences to create virtual groups what we call our Synthetic Control Arms in this case of tests for clinical trial and compare this with virtual group of certain person characterization and then compare with real group of people. We are making big progress there because the clinical trials are targeting the right population and evaluating the risk on finding out the risk as quickly as possible as well as the efficacy of the therapeutics.

There is also another complexity with the vaccine, and hence, producing the vaccine is complex. It's a vaccine, a large molecule and living therapeutics. That might be another challenge with the planning. Basically, it's a worldwide program depending upon the sponsor, depending about the practitioner who wants to pay money on those programmes of scaling in a big way.

Plans for Indian market

Bernard Charles: India by itself, it's a gigantic market with gigantic needs and also a gigantic potential to reveal with the talents new possibilities, whether it's transportation, energy and infrastructure. The world has been addressing those kind of mobility with solutions which in my mind can be simplified on the trigger lean and frugal approach of the Indian mentality is a real value.

India is an important territory for Dassault Systemes because we already know we have a lot of new resources to offer. There was a time when there was a lot of low-cost, high-quality production was in China. But, this is changing. Vietnam, Indonesia, India, etc., are becoming the destination for companies in Asia.

There is no reason why with our solutions and with the young workforces. With new range of innovation, new categories of consumers, creating new categories of market. This is where I see India possibilities, and we are investing a lot at Dassault Systemes. We are investing a lot locally at our large campus, on our partners and with our clients. We're investing a lot with government and education, because we believe that it can be a game changer.

For India, I dont think this is an exaggeration of our commitment and at the same time the speed at which things are changing is in some way complete. We were to increase our ecosphere and do the right thing. We can accelerate that process. I see new friends, new clients in India producing on API certification to produce medicine. It's happening, even in Pakistan.

India can play with that, with discipline, quality, and people explore new domains. It is also pointing to where we can bring up to well, like in manufacturing, high quality, good value for the cost kind of solutions. That's what digital is breaking through those things.

Leveraging Additive manufacturing

Bernard Charles: Additive manufacturing is a good way to compensate when your supply chain is not working anymore. We've seen this happening with some of our customers during Covid-19. If you have some parts that are missing, then you can design it.

In order to do that, you need to design the product in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. One of the reasons why a 3DEXPERIENCE platform is super important is that it helps you become resilience. When you enter the 3DEXPERIENCE design of your part, then when your supplier is locked down and cannot produce any more, then you can easily transfer the 3DEXPERIENCE twin of the part to the supplier or you can decide to print it using 3D printing.

This is the reason why 3D printing is essential, both in case of Covid-19 when you need to find alternatives, but also for SMEs or big companies that want to design a prototype. But, they don't need to find a supplier for prototype. You can just 3D print one of them. 3D printing can be an important play in your production or prototype.

This is why two years ago, we decided, at Dassault Systemes, to launch a marketplace of 3D printers. Whenever we were on the road, if you need a fact, we can just use our marketplace and either produce your product there, or just continue your production.

Potential of manufacturing operations management (MOM) in India

Bernard Charles: On additive manufacturing in life science, it's useful for medtech, because if you're doing a medical device, if you want to do a prototype, or smaller batch of equipment, then you can use 3D printing and you can also use 3DEXPERIENCE marketplace.

As for cloud, it's indeed very useful for all the big companies to continue to work and work from home due to COVID to work together from different places. It is also very important for SMEs for business continuity, but also for question of cost issue and small or medium enterprise might not have supply to sustain in order to install the software such as 3DEXPERIENCE platform on your own machine.
By using cloud solutions, you get to sell solution but you transform your capex into opex. And you can also pay us whenever you need a new or you can just buy it. In July, we are known that some of our solutions will be bought online to 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

With DELMIA Apriso and Manufacturing Operations Management, we have gone live in many manufacturing units in India, so we see a lot of expansion of that in the Indian market, and we are convinced it will increase productivity of manufacturing in India.

Covid-19 impact and Recalibration of business

Bernard Charles: We were planning about 2020 fiscal year growing at 25% to 27%. We have divided this growth by more than two and we are still growing. It’s clear that the focus has evolved in every sectors of the 11 industry we serve. In transportation and mobility, the focus is now on a new type of vehicle like EV, power management, optimization of power management, a new type of chassis, what we call is multi-function vehicle and skateboards.

Connectivity on local economies would be a step-by-step evolution. In aerospace, it's about the green clean sky. There is a lot of activities going on continue to optimise energy engine ignition and there are a lot of electrical, small airplane programs but this is mastering a technology for a long term.

When we talk about infrastructure, it's about optimising installation of quality of construction, that's a big issue. You can do that with drawings and I think you need to release 3D-based construction process to make this easy for people who are doing the job. In the future of construction, the drawing approach is going to be much more consistent with virtual guidance of doing the right thing or people doing modular construction at a lower cost. In construction, we should do manufacturing-base construction, which is really about low cost housing, high quality modules basically using the techniques of low cost manufacturing.

The transformation to really use the digital process to improve speed, quality on understanding of new therapeutics and also to improve the learning curve to train surgeon and other medical practitioners. As you remember, in Wuhan, we did a modular hospital in few weeks and we simulated all the airflow on transforming and this was done in a few hours. There is no reason why we cannot improve quality of hospital infrastructure at low cost by doing better simulation.

We are busy and doing everything to make sure that our partners stay in business. We're making sure that our clients can use and work from anywhere, using our cloud services on connected world. So, if people cannot go back to the office they can work and design remote manufacturing process.

So, we are busier than ever. Only a few hours globally Dassault Systemes was fully operating, not having people in our campuses. Because, I mean that transformation to work from home was done extremely quickly. We are not just an email system or a document system, where we manipulate are much more complex data and we did extremely well even in India. It's possible on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.