CATIA? DELMIA? EXALEAD? What do these brands actually mean? (In Layman’s terms)

And unfortunately the official marketing material often tries to cover all of the bases of what their brands do, and it usually needs to use vague language to do it. So for the aid of all of us who speak English, here’s a quick breakdown of what all of the most common brands actually mean:

CATIA

“I want to design a thing”

All of the capabilities Dassault Systèmes offers for defining what something actually is. What shape it is, what it is made of, and how it fits around other parts. This of course can mean lots of things when you think of different disciplines (Composites, electrical, aero-surfacing, etc…), and this is why the CATIA portfolio is so vast.

DELMIA

“I’ve designed a thing, how am I going to make it?”

Broadly speaking, DELMIA encompasses two similar worlds. One is the machining world, which contains products to simulate the machining of a part (and creates the program for it). The other is the manufacturing planning, where you can lay out your assembly lines, plan cycle times, create work instructions and predict faults.

SIMULIA

“Will my thing actually work?”

SIMULIA encompasses all of the products related to simulating how something behaves in a given scenario, so finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and the like.

ENOVIA

“Let’s get things organised”

The core of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform centres on ENOVIA, where all of the company management occurs. Easily the most diverse portfolio, generally speaking this is where projects are managed, BOMs are created, tasks are assigned and audit trails are made and kept, often automatically. The main drive of ENOVIA is trying to get various isolated functions of running a business in one place and more visible to one another.

EXALEAD

“Where is my thing?”

Exalead products are all search engines designed to index your company’s systems, including the 3DEXPERIENCE platform itself, and enable everyone to waste less time looking for files and objects. Also included are similar and duplicate searches, to find where the same data has been made twice and to reduce the risk of that happening in the future.