Dassault Systemes and Bill of Materials of Humans?

PLM events go digital. If you missed my earlier blog about transformations of events, please check it here – PLM conferences go digital: what to expect from your next virtual event? Earlier, I already participated in PTC LiveWorx 2020, Siemens RealizeLive 2020, and few other events.

I attended Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE: A Virtual Journey event earlier today. Check it out here. The event will continue in multiple days spread between multiple weeks. All sessions are virtual presentations and they became instantly available after the event. So the date and time are technically meaningless as it doesn’t provide an “event experience” rather than a virtual presentation. The first day included a keynote by DS CEO and Vice Chairman Bernard Charles as well as a presentation by key customers and Q&A.

I captured a few slides from the keynote. If you want to pick one thing from the entire presentation, think about the “human body”. Dassault Systemes is a highly visionary company. If you follow them for years, you can see the transformation of a single important slide of Dassault story (now called legacy) taking it years back in design and PLM, but these days presenting and experience and life science.

Listen to Bernard Charles and you will see that cars, planes and industrial equipment are in the past. Machines are done and now Dassault Systemes is moving to human design and systems that surround humans. The ambition of DS can be explained here.

What does it mean? This is a question I was looking to answer. The distance between visionary presentations and actions is usually huge, so you need to bring some imagination into this. With my PLM twisted mind, I wanted to find a simple association that can explain the vision. I found one – Bill of Materials of Humans. I know “Virtual Twin” sounds fancy, but when you take it down to reality, it usually ends up with the data structures. A human body can be modeled in a number of ways. Thinking about mechanical BOM is one thing, but there are many others and it is implied in many   To have systems capable of designing humans, their behaviors and variety of aspects related to human activities – this is where the Dassault Systemes is going.

What is my conclusion?

Dassault Systemes is outlining a grand vision for the 3DEXPERIENCE platform across manufacturing, cities, and humans. Dassault promises to bring an existing experience in manufacturing in human space and human design. It will be very interesting to watch the evolution of the platform in such a direction. Just think about a variety of tools to design human behaviors, bodies, and related parts. Does it sound too much for you? Is it even possible? Humans are much more complex than any manufactured product. And Dassault Systemes was never afraid of complexity. We need to credit Bernard Charles for his decades of vision and connecting dots. One day a digital model of an airplane was a dream and now it is a reality. So, bill of materials for humans might not be a mission impossible for DS. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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.