SUMMARY
Business Challenges:
Contechs’ complex relationship with the OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers it operates between.Collating design data from an array of sources and formats during design reviews.Carmakers developing internal combustion, electric and autonomous vehicles in unison.
The Solution:
- Full utilisation of the capabilities of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
- 3DEXPERIENCE capable of time- compression in the design engineering phase, and improves relationships with suppliers and clients.
Business Impact:
- Contechs realise significant business savings and increased engineering and design capacity.
- 3DEXPERIENCE breaks down silos and improves collaboration.
- Trust between all parties enhanced by platform data security.
SPEEDING AHEAD OF MOBILE DISRUPTION
Autonomous driving, connectivity, electrification and shared
services are paving the way for entirely new forms of
mobility, bringing rapid and fundamental change to the
automotive industry.
“The future is not going to be driven by the car’s engineering
prowess,” said Alan Yee, engineering director at Contechs,
UK-based specialist design and engineering services to OEMs and
Tier 1 and 2 suppliers in the automotive sector. “The capabilities of
the batteries will be a given. The future of the car industry is going
to be changed socially. We’re going to get what I call a megacity
concept, where vehicles will travel autonomously in a larger
metropolis megacity within a geo ring-fenced area, connected to
all the different systems in the city scape. And then we’re going to
have the other more traditional vehicles for people to buy or rent
and use for longer distance traveling.”
“Everything is going to be more electrically orientated,” added
Peter Jarvis, managing director of Contechs. “With that comes
new platform engineering concepts, including skateboard
platforms, which gives manufacturers the ability to scale
skateboard platforms and put different top hats onto them to
differentiate themselves.”
Contechs works with some of the largest automotive
manufacturers in the world to develop new, innovative products
and services that help their vehicles stay ahead of an everchanging market. This gives the company unparalleled insights
into how the industry will develop.
“We have the ability to design the complete car right down to a
single entity such as a seat system,” Jarvis said. “We work with
very prestigious clients; confidentiality is key. We work two to
three years in advance of products going to market.”
From Contechs’ perspective, one of the key issues carmakers now
face is to develop different vehicles and powertrains—internal
combustion, hybrid, electric and autonomous—in parallel.
Contechs, like many others in the industry, believes the solution
lies in the ability to adapt and reuse existing designs to suit
multiple purposes.
“It is a very complex relationship being in the middle
between the OEM and the Tier 1 supplier,” Jarvis said. “The
3DEXPERIENCE platform enables us, in terms of software,
to bridge that gap and allows us to organize ourselves with
modular thinking and concepts. It’s the next big bang in terms
of how we carry ourselves forward and should really deliver
time compression in the design engineering phase, allowing us
to work simultaneously with the first-tier supplier and the OEM,
and drive cost out of the end product.”
A SECURE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT
Contechs’ aim was to bring all of its disparate software packages
onto one platform in order to better connect with their clients
and suppliers.
“We have an awful lot of complex systems and what
Dassault Systèmes has enabled us to do is to bring all of those
systems onto a single platform,” said Dan Moran, Group IT
manager at Contechs. “This has given us the fluidity we need
to connect to our clients and our suppliers, and obviously keep
that data really secure.”
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a highly secure, central
location for Contechs and its clients to manage all data, instantly
access it, compare it and identify what can be reused in new
designs. Over time, Contechs hopes to transition all its clients to
this new platform-based way of working.
Establishing trust with proven security is critical for Contechs’
long-term relationship with clients, who regularly charge the
company with highly confidential information
“We must have a secure environment where we do our designs,”
Jarvis said. “Everything is key-locked down throughout
everything we do. The process going from concept engineering
all the way through to launch involves a lot of iterations with
regards to how we do our design and software releases, and all
of that is done through a very controlled process.”
“We store a lot of sensitive data for our clients,” Moran added.
“There’s a lot of security within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
So, we are able to give the users full access to that data, which
creates trust between the two parties. We also allow them to
create their own workspaces using the platform.”
This approach puts far less of a burden on the IT department
too.
“Our IT landscape historically used to be servers on sites, and
backing up that data and storing it used to be a big headache,”
Moran said. “With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we can now
interact and connect with our suppliers’ environments, which
takes a huge amount of backup and data risk away from us.”
AGILE COMMUNICATION
Before using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Contechs’
departments worked in siloes on a variety of different software,
making it impossible to gain full visibility into the product
development process.
“Now, we don’t have huge amounts of spreadsheets everywhere,
or plans, drawings and clippings from people’s emails that we
have to try and piece together in a design review,” Yee said.
“It all sits in one area. We’ve also brought in parts of the
organization that aren’t directly associated with engineering.
It’s about bringing everything onto one platform and digitalizing
the whole process.”
Running all operations from one platform opens up
communication across the organization, helping employees to
work together effectively with more awareness of one another,
and improve collaboration with clients.
“People from all different areas now have an open channel
of communication,” Yee said. “The system records that
communication, recalls what was said and done, allows users
to load pictures and events, pull data from CATIA and other
software, and present it in an intuitive manner, like an online
blog, so it’s much easier to understand. We now have multichannel communication on one platform, bringing all disparate
company organizations into one place.”
THE CAR, REDEFINED
Backed by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Contechs has the
confidence to support OEM and suppliers’ ever-growing needs
as they redefine what the car of the future will be. To keep up
with the fast pace of change, Contechs is keen to harness the
power of virtualization to speed up and scale production, backed
by its new mantra: “virtual is vital.”
“Without virtualization, we don’t think that we’re going to be
able to develop vehicles to meet the demand in the future,” Yee
said. “It’s not going be possible; it would take too long. We’re
now going to go back to putting lots of different vehicle types on
top of one platform, which is really speeding up production. And
the only way we can do that is by doing everything virtually.”
“The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is absolutely perfect for us,”
Yee said. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for. It gives us the
opportunity to add extra dimensions into it and see the whole
picture—not just bits and bobs from our CAD software package
or finance software package, and manufacturing engineering
sets of drawings. We can see where all of our resources sit, so
we can perfectly scale our business to suit.”