What is the 3DEXPERIENCE platform?

Here at the SOLIDWORKS office in Waltham, MA, the food aficionados among us were all awaiting one big opening event this summer. Time Out Market, a food hall situated in a renovated industrial warehouse in Boston’s Fenway area, features a communal dining space flanked by a multitude of restaurant counters, each headed by local culinary stars preparing the best food and drinks that the city has to offer. Live music and local art are also on display all around—the whole place is like a living, breathing collection of the city’s experiences, changing every season that passes.

Time Out Market is successful because it is more than just the sum of its parts; food, art, music– with a lot of care, all these things can come together to occupy a unique place in visitors’ minds. When writers and economists talk of the emergence of the Experience Economy, this is it. Dare we say, it looks like a platform for sharing social experiences!

If today’s status quo for design and engineering tools is like going out to eat, but driving across town for each meal course when the streets are congested and directions are unreliable, then a platform should bring everything you want and need under one roof.

We know…the word ‘platform’ is thrown around a lot these days, especially in the tech world. It seems like everyone is pushing their own app store or ecosystem. And it’s understandable why platforms are on everyone’s minds—it is widely studied that switching between different tasks and tools costs us as much as 40 percent of our productivity.¹

Engineers and designers especially face this challenge, having to model and revise products, simulate and validate designs, generate drawings and renderings, and communicate all these changes to teammates, suppliers, and customers. It’s hard enough to juggle all these tasks under pressure…picture the added costs of switching to a new software tool for each one!

Enter the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

The cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE® platform provides access to a growing portfolio of solutions that work together seamlessly. It serves as a hub you can tailor to meet your specific product development needs. It empowers your teams to create dashboards and communities, aggregate and share data, review and iterate on designs—connecting people and data in one place to empower collaboration, agility, and faster time to market.

With the platform, DASSAULT SYSTÈMES’ makes the most powerful technologies and intuitive capabilities accessible in the same environment, whether on premises or in the cloud, on your workstation or on a mobile device. If you’re a SOLIDWORKS desktop user, you can automatically push updates of your models to the platform instead of switching to email, product data management software, or other messaging tools to ensure your changes don’t get lost. If you’re concerned about the time and resources needed to set up and maintain on-premises software and infrastructure, you can choose the cloud. If you have field and mobile staff, you can enable them to access the data they need from any place, at any time, and on any device with a web browser and internet connection.

The platform offers a portfolio of solutions including:

⦁ Parametric Modeling: Create 3D conceptual and detailed designs quickly and edit them in SOLIDWORKS.
⦁ Subdivision (Sub-D) Modeling: Design 3D organic shapes quickly and easily and edit them in SOLIDWORKS.
⦁ Data and Product Lifecycle Management: Manage product designs and documents without leaving SOLIDWORKS, easily perform lifecycle operations, navigate product structures, and manage tasks and projects.
⦁ Advanced Simulation: Assess structural integrity with powerful Finite Element Analysis-based simulation technology you can access directly from SOLIWDOWRKS Simulation.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform goes beyond what you might typically think of design and engineering tools. A project management solution allows teams to split up responsibilities, with direct linkages between up-front tasks and the models created throughout the project’s life. A built-in cloud storage helps teams avoid the risk of drifting out of sync on model revisions or assembly configurations, and instead focus on the real design work. Custom communities can be set up on the platform enabling users to gather and share their feedback, and make decisions on next steps quicker than ever before.

You may not be aware you’re performing these activities on a daily basis, but chances are you’re constantly switching to other software programs that weren’t really designed with your needs as a product developer in mind. Avoiding the switching costs, learning curves, and data migration headaches of different software tools can empower you to gain back your productivity and be your most powerful asset in today’s competitive environment.

So whatever your specific role or workflow needs, the platform provides the tools and the environment you need to create and manage a product all the way from cradle to grave, and that isn’t confined to modeling and manufacturing parts, but also ensuring regulatory compliance or even managing how you engage with customers on social media. 3DEXPERIENCE is a business experience platform—it’s so much more than design and engineering.

Not sure where to start with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform? Not to worry! You’ll find solutions designed specifically for your functional role within a team or organization. You can also explore how the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can help you streamline your product development process. Our next blog post dives into detail on one of our most popular solutions, 3DCreator, so stay tuned!

1. “Multitasking: Switching Costs,” American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask, March 20, 2006.