Digital manufacturing PLM solutions launched in SA

Information and communication technology (ICT) service provider T-Systems South Africa has launched product life-cycle management (PLM) solutions for local industries, says T-Systems South Africa automotive and manufacturing industries business development and strategy head Michael Frans.

The solutions are the result of a partnership with three-dimensional design company Dassault Systèmes and industrial information systems company Fujitsu, which cater to the rugged environments and heavy-duty demands of the industrial sector, he says.

Dassault Systèmes’ 3DExperience Platform, Fujitsu’s industrial computer kiosks with built-in palm-vein user authentication and T-Systems’ ICT solutions provide an end-to-end products and services PLM. T-Systems will also provide local industrial users with access to high-performance computing resources, he states.

“With this partnership, T-Systems and Dassault Systèmes plan to offer the 3DExperience Platform from the cloud,” he adds.

The service is designed to help manage design and product simulation. The paperless solutions enable organisations to manage their products and services, from design and engineering to the customer environment. This makes it well suited to the needs of the automotive and manufacturing industries, as well as other sectors of the economy, from the financial sector to smart city programmes, he adds.

The solution aims to eliminate problems typically associated with common industrial PLM processes – such as damage to and loss of paper-based designs and complex change tracking – as well as repetitive hardware repairs and replacements, as a result of the rugged environment of an industrial area.

“The planning, design and management of products or services become simpler and easier to manage with PLM solutions,” reiterates Frans.

Users will be able to use the software to collaborate across organisations in an industrial value chain. In the production areas, the Fujitsu kiosk systems enable staff to view the current build instructions and important production information.

“These solutions mean that the time spent on the design, redesign and fine tuning of a product or service is reduced, while records of changes are stored and managed.”

South Africa is ripe for solutions addressing end-to-end business processes. South Africa is a growing market with businesses that are beginning to recognise the value of using virtual applications to remain a step ahead of the competition, says Dassault Systèmes partner: acquisition and success manager Natasha Sampson.

“We are strongly invested in South Africa – a common thread between ourselves, T-Systems and Fujitsu – and are proud of an innovation of this disruptive scale emerging from these shores.”

Fujitsu recognises the value in the partnership. “Dassault Systèmes has a robust software solution: Fujitsu [is] an industrial hardware offering suited to launch the software solution and T-Systems [has] the experience and cloud platform to offer it as an end-to-end solution, including Fujitsu servers and server platforms as needed by customers,” says Fujitsu South Africa channel and marketing manager Steven Kramer.

The cloud-based solution aims to make PLM accessible to the South African engineering and manufacturing industry and is called a simulation-as-a-service offering in South Africa, concludes Frans.