A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Dassault Systemes Big Dreams, 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace and Part Supply

Dassault Systemes Big Dreams, 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace and Part Supply
Oleg
Oleg
12 February, 2018 | 3 min for reading

My last post about SOLIDWORKS World 2018 is about dreams. I’ve heard Bernard Charles, Dassault Systemes Vice Chairman and CEO said “We all have big dreams”. I wanted to find what is the biggest dream of SWW2018 that match my dreams about future of engineering and manufacturing.

Here is my favorite – 3D EXPERIENCE Marketplace. Presented by Senior Vice President of DS, Florence Hu, it looks like a future of digital transformation connecting industrial suppliers with engineering and manufacturing companies.

I wonder what is a difference between Enterprise and Community services. My hunch enterprise services is somewhat deployed and used by large OEM (eg. Boeing) and Community is driven by connections and providers affiliated with Dassault Systemes. I think, there is an overlap between them, but I can see a point to split.

A practical example for engineers using SOLIDWORKS is Part Supply service. The following screenshot shows me a way to select part to be used in my project. That’s something useful and I can see engineers are using it every day. People are ordering parts using variety of services online (McMaster-Carr, Fastenal, MSC, etc.). However, some others can go to ACE Hardware store.

How Market place and Part supply can help? To check this, I registered for Part Supply to make few searches and see how can I order Parts.

The following screenshots can give you an idea about what experience can you get from sign-in, browsing through the list of suppliers and parts.

Then I tried to go with the following search “3/8″-16 x 1″ Grade 5 Zinc Finish Hex Cap Screw” for my future project (the select is artificial – I just thought that ordering of Hex Cap Screw can be something ordinary ever project will be facing).

Unfortunately, I failed in Part Supply. Search didn’t bring any results.

I’ve got some luck by searching for “3/8 Hex Cap Screw”. It was not exactly what I was looking for. But I was able to download SOLIDWORKS Model together with BOM information in txt file. The part was sourced via TraceParts. The available supplier was in Italy.

I tried few online services used by companies I’m familiar with – Fastenal and McMaster. I found the screw as you can see that on the following screen captures.

And McMaster-Carr was ready to ship it in the morning

What is my conclusion? Digital marketplace is the future. I have no doubt about it. Current processes are very much fragmented. I can order parts on McMaster Carr, but when I need to fulfill the order for my entire project, it requires either large enterprise system or lot of “dance” with Excel spreadsheets. Integrated environment is a great dream – I agree about it with Dassault Systems. But it is not here yet. We will keep dreaming, but most importantly focus on digital transformation and how to bring big bulk of Excels into new digital eco-system of cloud services. It looks like 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace is aiming to become one of them. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
6 April, 2010

I’d like to put a short note this morning. It comes from my review of Patently Apple blog. The very...

25 September, 2021

The discussions around open source were around for more than a decade. You can check out my articles about PLM...

29 September, 2015

Mass production involves making many copies of product, very quickly for lowest possible cost. It is all about producing standardized...

14 March, 2014

We are really bad about managing ourselves. The natural people behavior is to create mess. Life is getting more dynamic...

3 July, 2015

Aras is probably doing something right. At least this is an immediate thought that comes to my mind when I...

19 July, 2010

If you listened to the news stream from Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference last week, you probably had a chance to get...

23 August, 2010

Manufacturing company enterprise landscape becomes more and more complex every year. Companies are implementing new products and versions of existing...

23 September, 2014

IoT is one of the recent popular buzzwords in business and consumer world. I’ve been touching it in few of...

15 January, 2014

The word “social” is getting into many places these days. However, very often, it is overloaded and misunderstood by people...

Blogroll

To the top