China’s Largest Automotive OEM Enhances Product Development and Innovation Capabilities with CATIA

PRESS RELEASE May 25, 2007 01:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Dassault Systèmes, a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced that Shanghai Automotive Co., Ltd (SA), China’s largest automotive OEM, will deploy DS’s CATIA throughout the group: R&D Center and Suppliers across China; Shanghai Automotives engineering branches in the UK and SSANGYONG Motor in Korea. The signing ceremony was held in Shanghai today at DS’s 2007 PLM Executive Summit. Driving these solutions throughout the enterprise will allow SA to enhance its own brand car development, innovation capabilities and ultimately boost efficiencies and quality.

“Thanks to the common architecture linking with CATIA, we are building a virtual product development environment where designers and production planners, no matter where they work, can collaboratively explore and validate design and manufacturing decisions. It is milestone for the cooperation between DS and SA,” says Zhang Xinquan, CIO of SA.

“As China transforms from a ‘Made in China’ to a ‘Created in China’ economy, streamlined PLM solutions are essential to speeding time to market and product innovation, prerequisite criteria to gaining and maintaining global market share in the automotive industry. This marks the most significant commitment to date of PLM business in China’s automotive industry,” comments Bernard Charlès, president and CEO, Dassault Systèmes.

DS’s CATIA, the industry standard for designing the virtual product, enables users to simulate the entire range of industrial design processes, from initial concept to product design, analysis and assembly. CATIA seamlessly integrates with ENOVIA thanks to DS’s open, component-based architecture (CAA). This will help SA to easily deploy the next step of its PLM strategy, ENOVIA VPLM, which enables users to manage highly complex product, resource and manufacturing processes in medium and large extended enterprises.