Dassault Systemes and IBM announce Version 5 Release 13 of their product lifecycle management portfolio.

Dassault Systemes and IBM have announced the release of Version 5 Release 13 (V5R13) of their product lifecycle management (PLM) portfolio, comprised of CATIA for collaborative product development, and ENOVIA and SMARTEAM for product data and life cycle management, collaboration, and decision support. Concurrently, Dassault Systemes announced V5R13 of DELMIA for the engineering of lean manufacturing processes.

V5R13 is the result of development collaboration between industry-leading manufacturers, their supply chains, and Dassault Systemes. These companies have chosen V5R13 to support their major new product programs.

The new release extends the power of leading-edge engineering practices to include relational design, a breakthrough PLM best practice that provides engineers with full visibility on dependencies and the impact of their decisions. With relational design, they can better manage design modifications, including impacts on functional specifications, analysis, and manufacturing constraints. This practice results in higher quality designs the first time, fewer engineering changes later in the design cycle, and more opportunity for innovation.

A major innovation in the V5R13 release is the new ENOVIA VPM Navigator product that enables manufacturers to take maximum advantage of relational design, integrating ENOVIA's virtual product definition into CATIA's easy-to-use design environment. This unified PLM workspace empowers teams to work together as one during the critical product development phases, resulting in faster and easier "right first time" collective product innovation.

V5R13 also extends industry-specific capabilities that support new product introduction programs, makes them available to supply chains and smaller businesses, and improves deployability through increased openness and standards support.

The V5R13 product portfolio brings business value to manufacturers in the following areas:

Powers Major Product Programs--V5R13 powers major product programs by enabling manufacturers and their supply chain to deploy competitive new PLM best practices that reduce development cycles by at least 20%.

Design in Context, Decide in Context--ENOVIA VPM Navigator provides unprecedented data management capabilities from within the familiar environment of CATIA, allowing engineers to manage their designs in the context of the overall product, collaborate in a dynamic design environment, avoid errors, and speed development cycles. The new application enables companies to view the full implications of design changes in order to facilitate decision-making and reduce the risk associated with new product innovation.

Process Expertise Inside--Best practices captured in new industry-specific applications and process templates enable manufacturers to deploy competitive methodologies to increase productivity through streamlined processes. For example, V5R13 introduces new specialized CATIA products for automotive body-in-white, electrical design and documentation, and cast and forged parts.

World Class PLM for Medium-sized Businesses--V5R13 makes robust PLM practices available to companies of all sizes through specialized right-sized PLM packages for Industrial & Consumer Products, the Electronics industry, and the Automotive and Aerospace Supply Chains. SMARTEAM's new platform-independent infrastructure, thin-client CATIA integration and Program Management extend product life cycle capabilities within and beyond the corporate firewall.

Proven Openness and Standards Support--Underscoring IBM and Dassault Systemes' commitment to openness and global IT standards, V5R13 includes enhancements in APIs, plug-ins, interfaces, and standards. These improvements make it easier for companies to personalize their PLM platforms, share data with systems used by partners, and integrate PLM solutions with legacy systems.

"V5R13 ushers in a new era of PLM-driven innovation," said Bernard Charles, president and CEO, Dassault Systemes. "Merging product design with product data management in a single unified environment makes it significantly easier for engineers to effectively collaborate, navigate and work in context on complex product structures. It enables them to exploit relational design to its full extent. The benefit of knowing in advance the impact of engineering changes, as well as the associated time savings, allows manufacturers to focus on innovation--the key to success in today's competitive marketplace."

"To break into global healthcare markets, our company required a complete solution for the development and delivery of innovative surgical instruments and implants," said Sylvie Plumet, vice president, Aesculap Implants, a European leader in the medical implant device market. "Our new V5 platform delivers improved product development and collaborative functionalities. Automated design updates and tracking functions allow us to reduce the time necessary to develop and deliver high quality orthopedic devices to a growing international market. More importantly for our business, we now have total traceability of the entire product development process. The PLM platform from IBM and Dassault Systemes provides a complete solution for product design, collaboration and documentation, all essential to stay competitive and grow our business."

CATIA for collaborative product development--facilitates business transformation and large-scale deployment of PLM with dedicated products such as the new CATIA--Cast and Forged Parts Optimizer 2 (CFO) that reduces the time required to complete the design and manufacturing preparation of a forged part by up to 15%.

ENOVIA for product data and lifecycle management and decision support--provides unprecedented data management capabilities from within the familiar environment of CATIA with the new ENOVIA VPM Navigator product that enables design engineers to seamlessly design in context in a collaborative workspace.

SMARTEAM for product lifecycle collaboration--delivers a new platform-independent infrastructure that powers the new, intuitive, thin-client SMARTEAM--CATIA Xtended Integration (CIX) product for CATIA V5 users, new configuration management capabilities, and the new SMARTEAM--Program Management product.

DELMIA for the engineering of lean manufacturing processes--enables manufacturing process-planning collaboration between an OEM and its Tier 1 suppliers, as well as reduces by as much as 90% the time it takes to update large product structures between the Engineering Hub and Manufacturing hubs.