The biggest software company you’ve never heard of has set an ambitious goal: It literally wants to transform the way we design and build everything.

Dassault Systèmes will probably get a hearing from its customers. The $2.3 billion Paris-based maker of 3D design, 3D digital mock-up and product lifecycle management (PLM) software is little-known outside its niche market, but in the engineering and CAD/CAM field it’s a giant. Its 12 brands span the product design, modeling and production planning process and are used by 190,000 companies worldwide, including all the major auto manufacturers.

Bernard Charlès, Dassault Systèmes’s CEO since 1995 has a knack for big ideas and a track record of making them pay off. Three years ago he outlined a new approach to product design that starts with the customer at the center. Instead of defining constraints like machines and materials and then designing products within those limits – which is how product design has traditionally been done – the customer designs the ultimate experience and then machines figure out how to build it.

The ‘b l e u’ virtual showcar was fully developed inside Dassault Systèmes’s 3DExperience social collaborative environment

Sophisticated three-dimensional design software is part of the equation. So is 3D printing, the red-hot technology that enables customized finished products to be built from computerized designs with high degrees of precision and little waste. Charlès says 3D printing technology, which is also called additive manufacturing, “helps people create an experience without having any idea how they will deliver that experience.” And that is liberating.

In harmony with nature

Now Dassault Systèmes is extending the concept to embrace sustainability, a force that Charlès believes will transform the way nearly everything is designed and built. The planet simply won’t permit humans to make products the way we have for the past 200 years, he told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “In the future we will need to be much more frugal in how we use resources,” he said. Mother Nature will be the guide.

Charlès first big roll of the dice came just a year after her ascended to the top job. Dassault Systèmes teamed with Boeing Corp. on a $10 billion gamble to design the 777 aircraft entirely in software. The bet was considered daring because design had always been done with paper schematic diagrams. Changing the process required not only retraining thousands of people but also winning over a cadre of notoriously conservative engineers. But the gamble paid off; the 777 was not only designed in record time but boasted 20 percent better fuel efficiency than its predecessors, giving it the range to enable smaller airlines to open new long-range routes and changing the dynamics of airline competition.

The following year Dassault Systèmes engineered an acquisition that many CFOs would regard as crazy. It paid $310 million in stock for SolidWorks Corp., a Massachusetts-based CAD/CAM software make that was losing money on just $9 million in annual sales. Charlès justified the large multiple in part because he wanted more than just the software; SolidWorks gave Dassault Systèmes a U.S. beachhead, and that was critical to the company’s global ambitions. The board backed the CEO. SolidWorks has since sold 1.5 million licenses worldwide in the 18 years since and is the core of Dassault Systèmes’s CAD/CAM suite.

Charlès next put forth an idea to take the industry beyond CAD/CAM, a ubiquitous 40-year-old  engineering discipline that has changed little since the 1980s. In 2000, he proposed expanding the role of computers in the product development process to encompass the entire lifecycle, from inception through retirement. The, concept became PLM, and it has transformed CAD/CAM, accelerated product development times, reduced defect rates, minimized waste and been credited with helping product developers align their products more effectively to customer needs.

“A striking feature in Dassault Systèmes’s communication around technology is the company’s visionary approach to almost everything,” wrote Engineering.com in a recent profile.

The new 3D vision is another step beyond PLM. Dassault Systèmes has invested $2 billion in new technology to support it, in the process acquiring a dozen companies over the last four years. The idea is to make design more holistic, taking into account the customer experience from consideration to disposal.

Take the auto industry. Automakers have always focused on continually making cars safer, more reliable and easier to control. But the driving experience isn’t just about getting from one place to another. It’s also about entertainment, smart phone connections, lighting, navigation aids and visual appeal. Dassault Systèmes’s 3DExperience concept takes all these factors into account at the design stage. With the impending arrival of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, the company is working with every large auto company to reimagine driving without the driver.

Rethinking design

Charlès is already on to bigger things. Recently he’s been traveling the world to promote a new approach to design that integrates seamlessly with the surrounding environment. The pitch encompasses elements of biology, sustainability and reusability.

One part is learning from nature via biomimicry, or creating products based upon tried and true designs in the natural world. For example, architects are studying termites for tips on how to build energy-efficient skyscrapers because insect colonies have been doing that for millennia. Aircraft makers have discovered that the physiology of duck necks is a strikingly effective design guide for strong but lightweight fuselages.

“Humankind for the last two centuries has largely ignored what we could learn from nature,” Charlès said. “Biomimicry will be the source of many new innovations.  It will happen everywhere.” The company has placed its own big bets with $1.5 billion in investments in life sciences for systems modeling and simulation over the past two years.

3D printing will be another transformative factor. Machines are being built that can craft everything from organ tissue to office buildings by fashioning raw materials into finished products with zero waste. That’s exciting from an environmental perspective, but it also enables unprecedented levels of precision when translating designs into products. As Charlès terms it, “You put the atoms only where they need to be.”

At a recent San Francisco event, Dassault Systèmes partners showed off the futuristic products that are emerging from 3D designs. They include an interactive model of a human heart that doctors can fly through or take apart to identify problems. Solar Impulse (right) is an experimental aircraft that is designed to fly around the world without using a drop of fuel. Dassault Systèmes is also working with the government of Singapore on a kind of real-life Sim City that will guide urban development decisions for decades.

At 58, Charlès is living an engineer’s dream (he holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering). But he says he finds as much joy in art and nature as in science. Asked what inspires him, he cheerfully responded, “Embracing life. When you love people you get great ideas.” The biomimicry initiate emerged from an eight-month hiatus he took three years ago to ponder the rest of his career. “I asked myself If I wasn’t here tomorrow, what would I want to be proud of?” he said. “I told the board what I wanted to do and asked if they wanted to hire me to do it.” They did.

Charlès has the luxury of some time to let his ideas play out. Although publicly held, Dassault Systèmes’s stock is family controlled, a fact that gives ideas more runway than they get at a typical American high-tech firm. Charlès counsels patience while the company works through the process of evangelizing some big ideas to a conservative customer base. With steady but not spectacular revenue growth for the last two years, the company clearly still has some evangelizing to do, but the CEO said the board is in it for the long term. “Science is back. The culture of art is back,” he said. “We have a new renaissance going on.”

Photo by Paul Gillin