On the first day of the Hannover Messe, it became official: Eplan and Dassault Systèmes agreed a technology partnership as part of the Eplan Partner Network, in which the PLM interface between the 3DExperience platform from Dassault Systèmes and Eplan will be further developed together from now on. The aim is to achieve seamless integration of electrical and fluid engineering in the context of product development. Dominic Kurtaz, Managing Director Eurocentral at Dassault Systèmes, and Sebastian Seitz, CEO of Eplan and Cideon, signed the agreement in Hanover. The partners will contribute their expertise to the benefit of their joint customers and enable companies to design their digital development processes consistently.

Aiming for greater process efficiency

Sebastian Seitz explains: "With the bidirectional interface between the Eplan platform and the 3DExperience platform from Dassault Systèmes, we are increasing the process efficiency of our joint customers. If all systems - for example ECAD, ERP and PDM - are connected bidirectionally, users can work in a truly interdisciplinary way and therefore much more efficiently."

"With this partnership, we are helping our joint customers to achieve new levels of efficiency and productivity in end-to-end product development. All this is made possible by the development and use of virtual twins," adds Dominic Kurtaz, Managing Director Eurocentral, Dassault Systèmes. "The bidirectional interface simplifies numerous processes and creates new opportunities for collaboration for our customers. We are therefore delighted to be taking this pioneering step together with Eplan."

The partnership will be further expanded in the coming months. Both companies are working closely together to further optimize the interface - the PLM 3DExperience Connector - and provide new solutions in the cloud context of digital product development. A joint demonstration environment is also planned as part of the Engineering Collaboration Network with videos and sample data in the PLM Cloud environment as well as joint interaction in customer projects.

Bidirectional coupling of engineering and PLM

The interaction between Eplan and the 3DExperience platform enables automated control of data management processes in electrical and fluid engineering. The special feature: Access to the cloud-based platform from Dassault Systèmes is available directly in Eplan Electric P8 and Eplan Fluid. For example, article and parts lists can be synchronized with a single click. From the perspective of the shared users, the automation of routine processes in particular makes everyday work easier: classic tasks such as searching for, finding and creating projects, checking in and out or exporting Eplan project pages as a neutral format are much more efficient with the data bridge. In particular, the fast and uncomplicated document generation will save users time and money, as all that is needed to output neutral formats is a tick when checking in. The neutral formats are then automatically linked to the corresponding Eplan project.

During interaction, Eplan and the 3DExperience platform communicate with each other bidirectionally: The check-in of projects from Eplan in the platform is automated, as is the opening of projects from the PLM system. Important descriptive PDM attributes, such as information for the drawing header, can be added company-wide in the 3DExperience platform and are automatically available the next time the Eplan project is checked out. The software also supports classic PDM functionalities such as the release or transfer of documents to production.