Dassault Systèmes recently sat down with ENGINEERING.com to talk about three of their apps to outline the vast capabilities of 3DEXPERIENCE. Using DELMIA, 3DEXCITE and BIOVIA, various members of a company can perform their tasks while ensuring communication among teams. Everyone from design and manufacturing to marketing can work together on a project successfully, even when miles apart.

Design Products at the Molecular Level with BIOVIA

Functions provided by BIOVIA. Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.

For example, let’s say a team is working on a new dosage for their pharmaceutical product. Bioengineers can use products such as BIOVIA to help assess how the new dosages might affect the medication.

“BIOVIA is the life-sciences-focused brand for Dassault Systèmes,” said Ken Butenhof, advisory field applications scientist at Dassault Systèmes. “We are trying to cover solution experiences across the whole breadth of requirements needed in the pharmaceutical industry, from early-stage idealization, discovery, all the way through to regulatory compliance.”

BIOVIA allows individual experts, from biologists, medical chemists and biological engineers to pass on their information on a product to others in the team.

As a result, BIOVIA becomes a repository of physical properties, 3D structures and predicted properties for molecules. Engineers can then use this information to predict how changes to the product, such as dosages, can affect it. This information, for example, can help the bioengineer ensure that the medication will remain stable and not aggregate as the dosage increases.

“We can take a target that can be identified at an early stage using our pathways analysis capabilities and then begin to model that in three dimensions and look at the atomistic scale interactions either at a bio-therapeutic target or small molecule target,” explained Butenhof. “We can optimize molecule and what other formulation properties it needs early in the development time, saving research time [and] money and [getting] to the result faster than the competition.”

Of course nothing in biology will become a replacement for experimentation. There are too many variables involved for computer models to perfectly predict how various molecules will react in vivo. However, by creating a digital model of the molecule, engineers will be able to gather information on that molecule that could avoid duplicating tests and make it easier to validate models and predict results.

“We can let those experts generate these models, calibrate their domain of applicability and determine what the error bars are on those models,” said Butenhof. “Now the end users of those models have that information and are able to determine if this specific model is useful for their particular case. This is where leveraging that information and being able to track when new models come along is useful.”

“The bottom line is we want to have the experts building the model and understanding the shortcomings and the special properties of the models,” added Butenhof. “These experts are able to build the models and publish them into a community where others can then benefit from it like the bench chemist or biologist. They can then leverage the information and make it the most useful.”

Once the bioengineer has completed their dosage analysis on BIOVIA, they can inform the team with information about the product’s stability. These files are then shared automatically on 3DEXPERIENCE, ensuring that everyone is working with the current information.

DELMIA Brings Continuous Improvement to Manufacturing

Summary of DELMIA functions. Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.

Now that the new optimal dosage of the medication is determined, production engineers can use DELMIA to ensure the manufacturing process can be optimized to the new mixing times, reaction times, larger packaging and any other factory changes.

DELMIA is a tool engineers can use to design and optimize a production floor.

“It helps to take the engineering information, convert it into our manufacturing hub and a manufacturing process [database],” said Andrew Robbie, senior business experience consultant at Dassault Systèmes. “DELMIA then optimizes that process for a new orientation on the shop floor while Apriso handles the execution of that shop floor.”

Apriso was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in 2013. It offers the DELMIA brand the ability to visualize and control business processes performed in production plants. Engineers can use it to create optional standards and continuously improve operations.

“Apriso provides the metrics and monitoring and key performance indicators to see if you are on track, under performing [or] over performing,” explained Robbie. “We can take that information from every plant around the globe and roll that up in a dashboard so that the operation executives can see how the plant is performing.”

DELMIA allows the production engineer to model the whole manufacturing process for the medication and optimize the system to the new dosage levels. “DELMIA allows you to balance the line to [avoid] bottlenecks. Ergonomics are also planned out for the manual operators and CNC programs for the robotics are created as well,” said Robbie.

Robbie explained that DELMIA is essentially a tool that is used to optimize your production facility according the theory of constraints with the added use of electronic monitoring. He said, “DELMIA helps to improve throughput through the factory by reducing inventory on the floor. It also streamlines the factory and reduces the time to introduce new products using templates of existing products. Some customers have seen immediate returns on the very first product.”

Using DELMIA should help the process engineer optimize the production floor and meet the proper dosages and throughput demands of the new product.

Assess a Product’s Functionality and Marketability with 3DEXCITE

So now that the process engineer has designed the new layout of the plant, he needs to convince the rest of the team that it will work. The problem is, not all members of the team will be engineers capable of visualizing the proposed changes. This is where 3DEXCITE comes in.

3DEXCITE helps engineers bring their CAD model to life by creating enhanced visualization material. Engineers can take their designs and process them into a visual document that can assist non-technical members of the team or potential customers weighing in on the design.

“We focus on bringing to life the product in a visual way,” said Curtis Evey, manager of creative client services at Dassault Systèmes 3DEXCITE. “We let the engineer make all the decisions and simulate everything, but we want to make all the beautiful textures and shapes come to life.”

“It’s kind of universal. We bring CAD out of the PLM system and into the visualization system DELTAGEN,” added Evey. DELTAGEN is responsible for creating the interactive real time 3D visualization images. “From there we add all the artistry,” added Evey. “We are on the marketing side, but internal marketing for virtual prototyping design engineering and external for customer-facing sales activity.”

As a result, 3DEXCITE fits in well with 3DEXPERIENCE, which attempts to bring collaboration to the forefront of the design team’s experience. Using 3DEXPERIENCE, the team can have a conversation on the design of a new production plant and 3DEXCITE can create the realistic images to help an engineer get his or her points across about how the new plant will optimize the medication’s dosage.

As an aerospace example, the video below demonstrates how a German seat design company, Recaro, used 3DEXCITE to visualize the benefits and drawbacks to its airplane seat designs. With very few words, a large amount of information is available, from how the color of a seat changes in the lighting to how uncomfortable a seat will be, and how various features of a seat function.

“The engineer doesn’t need 3DEXCITE. They need it to convince their boss to make a change,” said Evey. “An engineer can see in CAD colors and ones and zeros if something is wrong. But if they can convince their manager with a more visual way of storytelling, then that decision can be made more easily.”

3DEXCITE isn’t limited to Dassault Systèmes’ CAD product CATIA. It is compatible with about 35 different CAD formats. However, Evey does admit that they prefer to work with CATIA, as they are able to better ensure full compatibility with each third-party update. “CATIA data is a good choice to start with, but we take many source of data,” assured Evey.

With 3DEXCITE, the production engineer has produced animations to help the team understand how the new production floor will operate to accommodate the dosage changes to the product.

By keeping all the work within one platform, 3DEXPERIENCE, a team is able to ensure their file versioning and work with the most up-to-date information available. If used correctly, tools like the 3DEXPERIENCE can help a design team stay on target, on time and within budget.