ACADEMIA

IBM and Dassault Systèmes announced today the confirmation of their agreements with automotive manufacturer PSA Peugeot Citroën. Following the successful implementation of PLM solutions based on CATIA V4 and VPM, PSA Peugeot Citroën signed a contract for the deployment of CATIA V5 in December 2004 and through 2005 pursued its commitment to PLM with a joint work plan leveraging next generation digital mock up tools. This will help PSA Peugeot Citroën to speed the development of innovative cars and ensure optimal price-quality ratios, thus helping strengthen its leading position in the global automotive industry. PSA Peugeot Citroën's current challenge is to answer an ever-increasing demand for new car models, which need to be developed as quickly as possible. To dramatically speed the renewal of its Peugeot and Citroën car models -- one-third of its portfolio has been updated in the past year -- PSA Peugeot Citroën is using IBM and Dassault Systèmes' PLM solutions. These will be a key factor in helping PSA Peugeot Citroën attain its objective of growing sales to 4 million cars. The group has broadened its PLM implementation and deployed a full global IBM PLM solution including the latest V5 portfolio of solutions (CATIA, DELMIA, and ENOVIA) developed by Dassault Systèmes, IBM's middleware (DB2 database) and hardware (IBM eServers), and using IBM Global Services to ensure high availability of the PLM environment. PSA Peugeot Citroën is gradually migrating from CATIA V4 to CATIA V5 and deploying DELMIA in an integrated 3D digital mock-up environment. The group will leverage CATIA V5's new functionalities in a Virtual Product Management (VPM) environment, tailored to its specific needs by IBM Global Services, Dassault Systèmes' and PSA Peugeot Citroën's teams. The objective is to launch future car programs faster and in an innovative way, reusing existing knowledge with template-based approaches. PSA Peugeot Citroën has also selected DELMIA Digital Manufacturing Solutions from Dassault Systèmes to optimize final assembly processes in its manufacturing plants. Currently, these solutions are serving 29 vehicle development projects in 8 different plants throughout the world. "In a market that never stops segmenting and diversifying, the success of our group lies in its capacity to develop and launch differentiated and innovative cars as soon as possible to satisfy our demanding and diverse customers," says Jean-Luc Perrard, vice-president, Product/Process Information Technology at PSA Peugeot Citroën. "The deployment of IBM and Dassault Systèmes' PLM solutions helps us focus on our core businesses and guarantees the feasibility of new concepts that respect our security rules." In December 2005, to effectively anticipate future evolution of the automotive industry, PSA Peugeot Citroën, IBM and Dassault Systèmes defined a work plan to build the next generation digital mock-up for 2009. This will increase customer satisfaction as security and comfort requirements can be evaluated and optimized at an early design stage, and will avoid costly last minute changes. Thanks to the integrated PLM environment, design ideas will be shared earlier in the process with extended teams. This way, consistency between simulation results and CAD data can be guaranteed, helping speed up design decisions and constantly optimizing quality. With the PSA Peugeot Citroën group actively pursuing international expansion -- particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, China and Latin America -- IBM and Dassault Systèmes' collaborative PLM solutions give suppliers remote access to product development data and enable designers from 45 sites of the PSA Peugeot Citroën group around the world to access digital mock-ups in a well-controlled environment, each user having access to a limited set of data, according to their working perimeter. "PSA Peugeot Citroën, a world-class group within a highly global and competitive industry, has partnered with IBM on innovation, its key differentiator. Increased productivity, optimal quality and quicker time-to-market with the ability to keep development costs at a minimum: these are the benefits that PSA Peugeot Citroën can rely on with our collaborative PLM solutions. The recent agreement demonstrates our total commitment to helping our customers meet their critical business challenges," says Hervé Rolland, vice-president, PLM Solutions, IBM Europe. "PSA Peugeot Citroën's decision to extend its PLM implementation by migrating from CATIA V4 to V5 and deploying the DELMIA Digital Manufacturing Solution underscores the value it places on our PLM solutions and in our partnership," says Etienne Droit, executive vice-president PLM Sales & Distribution, Dassault Systèmes. "We have been working in close collaboration with PSA Peugeot Citroën for many years to develop specialized automotive best practices and modules which help them to focus on innovation. The result is a winning partnership for our companies."