Daimler Benz and Dassault Systemes Form Partnership

10 July 1998

Daimler Benz and Dassault Systemes Sign a Strategic Cooperation Partnership Contract on Technological Projects For Optimized Automotive Solution

    PARIS--July 10, 1998--Daimler Benz and Dassault Systemes today announce that they have signed a strategic cooperation partnership to work together on long-term technological projects covering the complete automotive development process with the goal of optimizing the end-to-end automotive process.
    These projects will cover car body styling, surface engineering, body-in-white and powertrain design, tolerance analysis, manufacturing, electronic data management (EDM), product development management (PDM II).
    The aim is to optimize the CAx/EDM product development and manufacturing processes at Daimler Benz by improving the use of CATIA, 4D Navigator, CATweb and ENOVIAvpm and by continuing development of the Dassault Systemes product lines to propose an even more competitive solution for the automotive industry.
    "We believe that the optimization of our CAx/PDM system is of paramount importance for our competitiveness. Our partnership with Dassault Systemes is based upon common targets, mutual objectives, and constructive collaboration," said Professor Balasubramanian, Senior Vice-President at Daimler Benz.
    Bernard Charles, President of Dassault Systemes, comments, "We will provide Daimler Benz an optimal automotive solution for the introduction of a complete digital mock-up and digital simulation in an innovative environment where Product, Processes and Resources can be modelled and optimized simultaneously. Also, with our supplier chain centric-approach, we will support the optimization of the product development along life cycle and across the whole Daimler Benz extended enterprise."
    The support of the migration from Syrko - the in-house Daimler Benz software - to CATIA as their main CAx system, as well as the introduction of CATIA native data formats as the binding reference format for product descriptions will be an early priority of this cooperative partnership.
    The software products resulting from this strategic cooperation will be integrated into the standard Dassault Systemes offerings.
    "The achievements of the goals of the cooperation will be measured in concrete projects. We are proud to bring our Automotive Development Process expertise to Dassault Systemes' automotive offerings while Dassault Systemes provides strong support and technical know-how. The cooperation process will bring paradigm value to Daimler Benz product optimization support," says Mr Lamberti, Vice- President CAx & EDM Systems at Daimler Benz.
    "The development plans concerning Dassault Systemes' product lines will be influenced by the mutual determination of needs and requirements of Daimler Benz with regards to its product development and industrial processes. This cooperation will enable our companies to achieve quality, time and costs benefits by addressing the widely varying requirements for management of virtual car information throughout the entire product lifecycle, and across the extended enterprise," comments Philippe Poelaert, Dassault Systemes Client Executive of Daimler Benz and Vice-president of Research & Development for ENOVIA Corp.
    Daimler Benz is the oldest and most famous manufacturer in the automotive industry. In 1997, the company sold about 715,000 passenger cars and 417,000 commercial vehicles worldwide. The revenue is about 124 billion DM. CATIA has been widely used by Daimler Benz since 1983, not only for components, body-in-white and powertrain design for cars and industrial vehicles, but also for simulation and manufacturing. On June 12, 1997, the german constructor confirmed its strategic selection of CATIA Solutions by signing a new three-year license and support contract. Today Daimler Benz has 2,500 CATIA seats installed in a heterogeneous Unix multi-platform enterprise system.
    Dassault Systemes is a worldwide recognized leader in CAx and PDM II markets. CATIA-CADAM Solutions with Deneb, the digital manufacturing company, address the CAD/CAM/CAE process-centric market. Through a unique strategic partnership, CATIA-CADAM Solutions are marketed, distributed and supported by IBM worldwide. This unique partnership is now extended to PDM II solutions. SolidWorks, a Dassault Systemes company, addresses the CAD design-centric market, with its flagship native Windows NT product and its dedicated distribution channel. In the network-computing environments, the Java-based CATweb product line provides a graphical window into native enterprise product data. For the PDM II market, ENOVIA Corp., a Dassault Systemes company, provides with its ENOVIAVPM and ENOVIAPM product lines a new multi-CAD collaborative and innovative environment for virtual product and process modeling and management across the extended enterprise.
    CATIA press releases and general information on CATIA are available on the CATIA home page at http://www.catia.com.
    CATIA is a registered trademark of Dassault Systemes SA.