What are Dassault Systèmes’ core activities?
We provide virtual universes to realise sustainable innovations. We create solutions that transform the way products are designed, produced and supported, fostering social innovation and expanding possibilities for the virtual world to improve the real world. We engage across 11 industries, ranging from aerospace and defence all the way to industrial equipment, consumer goods and life sciences, helping our clients solve many challenges, from designing new treatments using digital twin technology to managing the digital transformation of the supply chain.
As managing director, EuroNorth, what are your key responsibilities?
I lead the EuroNorth team at Dassault Systèmes, working in the UK and Ireland, Benelux, Nordics and Baltics. The uses of our technologies vary across these markets, and the requirements of our clients can also be different. For example, in the UK we support the manufacturing sector in its digital transformation journey. This includes better collaboration between humans and machines on the factory floor, digitalising all processes and engaging with future leaders to ensure they have the know-how of retiring engineers and managers.
What is the current condition of the market?
We recently recorded strong growth in the transport and mobility sector, in part due to new deals with Toyota and in aerospace with Lockheed Martin. We have acquired Medidata to help health innovators advance affordable precision medicine. Our 3Dexperience platform is seeing strong adoption across high-tech, life sciences, consumer packaged goods retail, automotive and aerospace.
How does the UK’s relationship with the EU affect your market?
Innovation and sustainability have no borders. We are a global business with 16,100 employees and more than 220,000 customers across 140 countries. We deal with companies on a local, national and international scale. We have recently become a member of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre to support the British manufacturing industry in its digital transformation. We also work closely with schools across the UK to help students understand and get excited about modelling and visualisation.
What are the long-term trends for your business?
We have long been a champion of business sustainability, both for ourselves and our clients. In 2018, we were ranked No 1 among the world’s most sustainable corporations by Corporate Knights. Recently, we were ranked No 2 in the Future 50 Sustainability All Stars by Fortune magazine. We are seeing our clients shift their business models this way too.
Employees are becoming more ecologically conscious and expecting their businesses to support that. Business leaders are focusing on sustainable initiatives, whether it is changing the material they work with, getting more visibility on the traceability of their suppliers or giving their employees more room to grow.
What has changed in your industry the most over the past five years?
The digital transformation has turned entire industries inside out. While the automotive or aerospace industries have been using virtual models for years, it’s a relatively new concept in life sciences. Traditionally, labs all worked behind closed doors, competing with each other to create treatments and evaluate the risks. That process took years and would often result in drugs going through lots of development before being dropped at the certification stage. Now various researchers can collaborate to build models of organs or even digital twins of patients. Our Living Heart project is just one case of such innovations.
What are the key technology trends likely to influence your organisation?
In the past, our solutions were used in isolation, but the cloud means we can now expand the reach of our solutions across industries, geographic boundaries and transformation projects. This opens the door to more innovation and collaboration, which then results in better, more sustainable products in the long term. For business leaders, it also results in more visibility on all aspects of the projects they’re leading.
How do you think management styles and strategies are evolving?
We are defining a journey, upon which it is imperative to seek buy-in and motivate all generations to work collaboratively. At Dassault Systèmes, there is emphasis on getting everyone involved in the journey and instilling these values together.
A few months ago, we organised a survey of business leaders to ask them what their priorities were when it comes to workforce development. Forty-two per cent of respondents told us that attracting and retaining talent was crucial. Thirty-two per cent told us that capturing knowledge and know-how was critical. The UK has an ageing population, and this capturing of information and reskilling is fundamental to the evolution of the market.
What is the single biggest opportunity globally for you at the moment?
Life sciences is one of our major strategic growth initiatives; the market is evolving at the speed of light. What the market needs is a better way to collaborate and develop products that will help turn the life sciences sector into a ‘patient first’ industry. We believe that each patient should be able to get a tailored treatment that suits their specific needs, be it a drug, a prosthetic or a medical device – and we want to play our part in enabling that.
What will your organisation look like in 10 years’ time?
We have entered the phase of industry renaissance, an era where the real and the virtual worlds merge to create new ways of inventing, learning, producing and doing business.
This new rule book is shaping the way Dassault Systèmes will evolve in the next 10 years and beyond. We don’t think of industry as a set of means of production, but as a process of value creation. The industrial sectors of the 21st century are much less concerned with flows of parts than with flows of usages and of virtual models, in an economy that eliminates friction and optimises the lifecycle using intelligent systems whose data is energy.
Want the best engineering stories delivered straight to your inbox? The Professional Engineering newsletter gives you vital updates on the most cutting-edge engineering and exciting new job opportunities. To sign up, click here.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.