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VISTAGY, Inc.
Product type: CAD/engineering software
Global HQ: Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
Opened: 1991
Web: www.vistagy.com











In todays hyper-competitive automotive industry, theres no
substitute for getting new designs to market quickly. This is equally
true for seat trim covers, which play an important role in dening
the aesthetics of vehicle interiors. Faurecia, the sixth largest
automotive supplier in the world, recognized the need to improve
the speed, efciency, and quality of its seat trim process, and
found the answer in VISTAGYs Seat Design Environment (SDE)
software (pictured here in use by Faurecia designers).
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VISTAGY, Inc. is a leading global provider of industry-specic engineering software and services that
enable engineers to efciently create rich product descriptions for better-informed decision-making
early in development. The Massachusetts-based company (founded in 1991) has sales and support
ofces throughout North and South America, Asia and Europe, and boasts nearly 300 customers
and over 4,500 software users. SDE is the rst seat design software application to address the entire
seat engineering process. It allows engineers to capture a complete digital product denition of a
seat system, accurately and efciently share design detail, increase the reuse of engineering data and
eliminate extensive physical prototyping. That is why companies such as Faurecia Group, General
Motors and Lear use SDE to reduce cost, improve quality, and cut time to market.
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SDE enabled Faurecia to cut the time it took to develop the rst prototype of a seat trim cover by 20
percent, provided a master model that was tailored to the needs of the seat trim engineer, increased
the accuracy of its bids, and reduced the cost of the entire process. Theres no question that SDE has
transformed our seat trim cover processes and enhanced our competitiveness, says Nicolas Michot,
manager of Faurecias R&D Seat Division and senior trim expert. Faurecia, which is based in Nanterre,
France, has four business groups: Automotive Seating, Emissions Control Technologies, Interior
Systems, and Automotive Exteriors. The company works with many of the worlds leading automotive
manufacturers, including Volkswagen, PSA-Peugeot-Citroen, Ford, Renault-Nissan and BMW.
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58 autumn 2011
4 Pictured here are seats designed by Faurecia
for the Mitsubishi Colt, created using VISTAGYs
SDE software in conjunction with the CATIA
V5 platform. Based on our comparison, SDE
offered the best compatibility with all systems
used by Faurecia and allows the most intelligent
design-to-manufacturing process, says Michot.
Typically, the automotive seat trim cover process
starts with a bid. OEMs provide suppliers with a
seat trim outline and ask them to provide pricing
and a delivery date. Having the ability to generate
a bid quickly and accurately enables suppliers
to identify product costs and producibility issues
as soon as possible and make any necessary
changes. SDE facilitates this process because
it has a utility for exporting data directly into a
suppliers or OEMs cost model, thus enabling it
to quickly calculate a bid based on its parameters
and requirements. The best part of SDE is that it
provides us with an early calculation of the cover
cost, which gives us a competitive advantage,
especially when submitting a bid, says Michot. It
also enables us to react quickly to manufacturing
issues. SDE helped us reduce the cost of the
entire design-to-manufacturing process.
Theres no
question that
SDE has
transformed our
seat trim cover
processes and
enhanced our
competitiveness
Nicolas Michot,
Faurecia R&D
Seat Division
Prior to implementing SDE, Faurecia used a
2D CAD process with work being performed
manually. The foam was developed rst and
then the at patterns for the seat trim cover were
created by hand, which greatly increased the
time it took to develop the patterns. Using SDE,
engineers are able to deliver the rst pattern
more quickly because they can create it virtually
without the foam. With SDE, the foam pad can
be built in parallel. Current 3D CAD systems
provide the necessary geometry, but not a way
to easily author the non-geometric data required
to fully dene a seat trim cover which requires
5,000 bits of data for a single seat cushion,
backrest, and headrest. Since SDE is fully
integrated into commercial 3D CAD systems,
its possible to capture geometric and non-
geometric data in a way that is perfectly intuitive
to seat trim engineers. Creating a CAD-based
master model enables engineers to spend
more time on designing and innovating, rather
than doing non-value added tasks, such as re-
entering data, creating drawings, and manually
generating at patterns. If a rm wants to be
competitive in the worlds automotive market, it
must enable its engineering and design teams
to easily author and share information and
expertise, points out Michot. A common
CAD-based interface for trim design makes it
easier to have common engineering processes
for sharing information, improvements, and
best practices. The importance of the master
model is magnied in the supply chain
currently, there is no efcient way for data to be
exchanged between OEMs, Tier 1 and Tier 2
suppliers. Using a detailed CAD master model
facilitates faster interaction between OEMs and
suppliers by allowing more detailed data-driven
communication about design, manufacturing
challenges and costs. Ultimately, Faurecia
found that the key to developing a more
efcient process was using a CAD-integrated
environment where geometric and non-
geometric information could be captured and
linked within a single master model, allowing
engineers and other key personnel to efciently
create and modify trim cover product denitions
and associated manufacturing and nancial
data. In the highly competitive world of seat trim
covers, that kind of efciency pays off.
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59 autumn 2011