Dassault Makes A Splash With Formula-Based PLM

Dassault Systèmes took a serious step to broaden its reach beyond its traditional customer base of discrete manufacturing companies in industries like aerospace and automotive. Identifying what it sees as a gap in its product line and a significant growth opportunity in the marketplace, Dassault Systèmes snapped up Enginuity, adding a full-fledged recipe management and formula authoring toolset to its PLM platform.

While Dassault Systèmes has long had an industry vertical accelerator package built around ENOVIA PLM for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, the option lacked the formula authoring component-a gap addressed by Enginuity’s  product line. Enginuity already has tight links to ENOVIA thanks to integration work sparked by their single shared customer in this space, Proctor & Gamble. As result of the acquisition and future integration work, process manufacturers in such industries as pharmaceuticals, personal care, cosmetics, food and beverage and life sciences will be able to more effectively manage and leverage their formula, packaging and consumer intellectual property (IP) in a single enterprise PLM solution as opposed to maintaining that same data in separate, siloed systems.

Prior to Dassault Systèmes announcement, companies in this space typically had to choose between implementing a broad PLM solution that lacked deep formula, regulatory, labeling and compliance capabilities, or invest in a point solution like Enginuity, which didn’t easily integrate to other enterprise systems or business processes. Other PLM vendors, including PTC and Siemens PLM Software, have targeted the CPG sector as a revenue opportunity, releasing packaged templates for industry-specific business processes, but they have not gone as far as to add a full formula authoring tool to their lineups.

Beyond market opportunity, Dassault Systèmes’ Rosemary Grabowski, head of ENOVIA Market Strategy, said the company’s extended product line is a natural complement to the Enginuity technology. CATIA can be leveraged to design the structural packaging, SIMULIA for package testing and DELMIA for simulating the entire manufacturing process. 3DVIA and 3DShopper come into play, allowing companies to take the products and actually put them on the shelf in a virtual sense to get feedback from customers.

Grabowski says that only about 12% of the potential market for formula-based PLM has tapped any kind of point solution, with the majority of companies still rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage this end of the business. I guess there’s no arguing with those numbers.