Dassault Systèmes Extends Digital Footprint With Intercim Acquisition

Looking to further extend its digital reach from engineering to real factory operations, Dassault Systemes has acquired Intercim, a maker of manufacturing operations management software, for $36.5 million.

The merger caps off the companies' long-standing partnership history, which includes joint efforts in the aerospace and defense industry, most prominently, a collaboration around the Boeing 787 program, as well as a minority investment in Intercim made by Dassault Systemes in 2009. While the DELMIA digital manufacturing platform is used to virtually define and monitor all production processes, Intercim takes it a step further by allowing customers in highly regulated industries like A&D and life sciences to demonstrate that what they built is exactly how they planned to build it and use the conformity information as part of the rigorous certification process.

Company officials positioned the merger as a part of the strategy to extend DELMIA's footprint in digital manufacturing and production to reach a large community of new users on the shop floor. By syncing the capabilities of the two systems, manufacturing and product engineers can glean an immediate and common understanding of any potential non-conformance issues or deviations related to any products being built on the factory floor. Traditionally, companies have used paper-based processes to manage and track operations on the shop floor and there is little to no real-time visibility between manufacturing personnel and engineers, let alone a single system used to facilitate shared data access and manage feedback.

"We realized there is value in creating digital continuity between the two systems," says Patrick Michel, vice president of marketing for DELMIA. Specifically, the two platforms working in concert give engineers visibility into manufacturing operations to ensure their designs are compliant with the organization's manufacturing layout and capabilities, while production personnel can diagnose problems and provide immediate feedback to engineering. The end result of this digital continuity: The ability to correct issues more quickly as well as to improve product quality and production efficiency, Michel says.

Given the companies's history of collaboration, much of the work to integrate DELMIA with Intercim's product family has been done. A version of the Intercim platform fully integrated with DELMIA was released last year. "This is not the usual case of a company buying another company and then scrambling to integrate," says Romain Lavault, vice president of strategy for Intercim. "The integration has been done and already sold [to joint customers.]"