EuroBusinessMedia (EBM): A discussion with ESI Group, a company that provides advanced services and software for the virtual design and virtual manufacturing of products for industrial companies. Alain de Rouvray, welcome.
Alain de Rouvray (AR): Well it’s my pleasure to be with you and thanks for having me.
EBM: You are the Chairman & CEO of ESI Group. How would you describe your company’s core business and activity?
AR: Well, ESI is positioned to help manufacturing industries to implement what is called today “Virtual Product Design”. Now, Virtual Product Design – it’s trying to make the good products right away without having to spend too much time on the manufacturing of prototypes. And people try more and more to make these early design iterations and optimisations on the computer rather than in the laboratory. So you could say that the general trend is to try to have a greener engineering and prototyping, where you don’t waste materials, you don’t waste time, you don’t create accidents. It’s right away; you come up with the first product, which is also the product to be certified or to be validated and you go for manufacturing. All the preliminary parts are done on the computer. So where we make a difference with the competition or specific positioning is that today, in the engineering profession, people can design their products, see the look of their products on the computer, but the performance and how to be manufactured is not so clear, usually they go to the lab. So we propose to stay on the computer to create this new product with the physical properties describing the processes and the physical testing. That’s why we say that our strong point is the modelling of the physics of materials. We are the bridge between the virtual world - which is more images and bits or pixels - and the real world - which is more like steel, plastic or bones and flesh and realistic. That's what we try to do, be a bridge between the two, bring realism to the images on the screen of designers.
EBM: What are key drivers in your industry today and how is the ESI group positioned to take advantage of them?
AR: Well, there are many key divers, maybe there are some long-term trends. The long trend is that this world is becoming more and more virtual, as a matter of fact people even try to have another life in a virtual world. So I would say the key driver is leveraging the potential of information technologies. Recently - or maybe not that recently - IBM was using the motto of “Enabling IT”. I think for us the key driver is to enable virtual prototyping or, in our field which has more technical terms, within the virtual product development, the PLM (Product LifeCycle Management), all of which are supposed to be virtual. We come in to make the virtual prototyping simulation-based design. So the key driver is; you can save time, you can save cost, but mostly you can innovate better, cheaper, cleaner with these virtual models. It’s a general trend, everybody wants to do that to the extent possible. Also, in the past, the main leverage on manpower was what - the steam engine? maybe the nuclear industry? So mostly leverage on energy. Now we provide a leverage on the mind, on the thinking and it’s a clean leverage, it’s a clever leverage, so it brings innovation in a fun way, in a very powerful way.
EBM: What are the main development challenges that lay ahead for ESI group?
AR: In the innovation field there are always a lot of challenges. The main challenge is that you don’t really know what the future will be made of and which innovation will succeed. So for us, a big challenge is to select the most promising avenues, where to invest, where to have partners and where to leverage our potential or resources; so some of it of course today is to recognise that the world is flat, so definitely going abroad to the emerging industries which need more virtual resources. That’s one challenge and I think we’re pretty well positioned there, because we now have a significant amount of our resources and customers, development resources in India, customers in India and in China more or more, in new areas like aeronautics, for instance, or new materials and composite materials – so that’s a big challenge - but I would say the challenge is as big as the opportunity. I think that’s a good fit. Another area, a big challenge, is to convince our customers, especially in the manufacturing industries, that it’s time to go ahead, and the big market comes with the community of pragmatic users; we’ve been very successful with the R&D people, now we have to prove that this type of technologies can be adopted right away by a large number of people, not only the most innovative ones, the farthest reaching companies, there the most important one is the automotive industry which is really the leader in virtual manufacturing Now the aeronautics industry also joins in, because they have to change, they have to change from metallic structures to composite structures, so they have to innovate, and if they do it the traditional way it’s too costly, too dangerous and the competition might do better. So there again it’s a big challenge with a big opportunity. And for us the issue is to demonstrate that what we have now can be adopted and fast enough. Some of the difficulties is that adopting our tools, it’s a little bit more sophisticated or risky than adopting, say, a new way to communicate. For instance if you have to switch from a landline to a cell phone for telephoning, it’s not that difficult, you can learn in a day. But switching from a methodology where you do the design on the computer and the validation and improvement in the laboratory on the hardware prototypes, that’s a big methodological change within the industry and somebody has to take the risk. We have to go along, it’s a big challenge, a big risk. So what we try to do – and with a reasonable amount of success - is go hand in hand with the customers, proposing software products which are very well validated - not in general but for the job to be done - demonstrated benefits to be gained and going step by step to enable these new technologies with these new manufacturing industries. And this goes very well and sometimes in very weird areas. Of course the main domain is transportation, with automotive and aeronautics, but now again the nuclear energy field seems to be quite promising. These people do not want to test on real hardware the real consequences of faulty design. So that’s a big opportunity. Also recently some people wanted to use this virtual prototyping for golf clubs. There the challenge was that since you cannot suppress the noise, well you might as well make it a nice noise. So we’re looking at trying to design and innovate to have a golf club that makes a nice noise when it hits the ball, like a Harley Davidson of some sort ! Lots of challenges, but fantastic opportunities as well.
EBM: Alain de Rouvray Chairman & CEO of ESI Group, thank you very much.
AR: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
