EDAG upgrades to Catia V5 for automotive engineering

Global automotive industry engineering supplier EDAG Engineering + Design in Germany is upgrading its engineering support suite by buying 500 seats of the latest Catia V5 CAD/CAM software from the IBM and Dassault Systemes alliance. The announcement came at the close of last year, with the signing of a multi-million euro software contract. EDAG has been an IBM PLM (product lifecycle management) software and services user for more than 10 years. Indeed, its Smart car vehicle design concept was constructed using Catia V4, and that software is currently a key part of its backbone ‘digital factory’ and ‘digital products’ initiatives. The firm, which has more than 3,600 employees world-wide, says these drive its engineering development services, which include vehicle and prototype development and turnkey production. They provide a product development environment that not only facilitates definition of the all important digital product but also integrates design and simulation applications. Roland Günther, EDAG’s IT manager, says that designing products digitally in 3D before manufacture is critical to developing high quality innovative prototypes quickly and at competitive prices. “We are moving to Catia V5 as a means to improve productivity, design more innovative products and enhance design capability,” he says. And he adds: “More and more of our customers use [the software] or are currently in the decision and migration process. Being able to share product design models with them before actually building a physical product gives them more decision-making ability … allowing us to get a product right the first time around.” Günther cites Catia V5’s ease of use, powerful digital mock-up of product models and good results during the evaluation programme as main reasons for its choice. “We concluded that Catia is a powerful application with respect to quality, design conception time and cost,” he says. The new contract covers company-wide design software migration.