Partners in Innovation: Recap of European Partner Leadership Summit 2019

Last week more than 300 business partners and Siemens PLM Software managers including our own Senior Vice President of Mainstream Engineering, John Miller, gathered in Spain for the European Partner Leadership Summit that took place over the course of one and a half days. During the summit, many partners shared customer success stories and key topics to pay attention to for the future of digital transformation of businesses across all industries.

John Miller spoke about the unique opportunity that small-medium businesses have to realize innovation through a digital transformation of their business. Digital technologies level the playing field for small to mid-sized businesses as a result of the efficiency gained. Because of their size, SMBs are far more readily able to transform their business through investing in new technologies when compared to larger corporations. This helps them to meet their key goals of improving the product development and design processes, achieve a faster time to market, and improve collaboration across the board.Solid Edge with its portfolio of affordable, easy-to-use software tools that address all aspects of product development is especially well-suited to help SMBs meet these goals.

Nick Rakkar, EMEA Business Development Director of Mainstream Engineering, was joined by Eric Kane, Operations Director of Team Engineering Ltd., to discuss the success Airbus Defence and Space has had in using Simcenter FEMAP, an industry leading FEA software that provides a mesh-based approach for the specialist FEA engineer. As the largest defense supplier in Europe, Airbus manufactures tactical and strategic airlifters, multi-role aerial tankers and advanced combat aircraft. The aerospace division has a hand in everything from commercial satellite launches, telecom satellites, and Earth observation satellites. Because Simcenter FEMAP is CAD neutral, it works well with their very mixed design environment. They use thermal, flow, structural dynamics, and non-linear simulation as well to test and verify the equipment they design.

Finally, Swiss-based Limbic Chair and Schatti, a Swiss design and manufacturing business, showed their innovation onstage with an electrically operated stool that has sensors which allow it to be used much like a computer mouse. The chair designed in Solid Edge was used onstage to control Solid Edge on a PC. How is this possible? The Limbic Chair lets your body interact with the virtual world to make navigation more intuitive and free your hands for others tasks. It interacts with virtual reality and non-VR applications, such as the spacial tasks of zooming, scrolling, rotating and panning. Schatti helped get it off the ground by providing design and manufacturing assistance. The chair was developed using the Limbic Life company’s knowledge of medicine and neuroscience to allow the user to be in an effortless state of weightlessness, and to utilize touch and movement in an entirely new way.

All in all, the event at EPLS served as a showcase for all of the wonderful and exciting things our partners and customers are accomplishing together across Europe with the help of technology from Siemens PLM Software, and in the case of the examples we touched on today, with Solid Edge and Simcenter FEMAP specifically.