"No walk in the park.

" The
inside story behind Mercedes
big CAD Switch from Dassault
Systmes to Siemens PLM
and NX
Large OEM's don't switch their enterprise CAD systems every day, so it was a big
deal when Daimler Mercedes declared their decision in 2010 to move from
Dassault System's CATIA to Siemens PLM's NX.
The company announced that it would replace Dassault Systmes CATIA with its
toughest competitor, Siemens PLM's NX.
This was a heavy blow for Dassault Systmes, but nothing could prevent phase-out.
Obviously Daimler had reached a level where the benefits of implementing a new
system outweighed the complexity of improving an existing one. And so the migration
process was initiated in the summer of 2011. The goal was to be finished with the bulk
of the migration in 2015 for cars and vans and in 2016 for trucks and buses.
So how did they go about with the adaptaion of this huge project? New information was
emerged from sources at Mercedes stating that the migration is going according to plan,
and that the project "PLM 2015" has entered a critical phase. The plan is to be done on
the automotive side by April next year. In total, more than 6,000 employees are affected
by the change, and to date over 2,000 have undergone the necessary training. The
remaining 4,000 are to complete the training program in 2014. this project was no
walk in the park. There were serious risks attached. after a four-year
implemention period, the project was almost finished. While it is a success, there
were some bumps in the road.
The CAD selection team went to the Daimler Board together with key users
The big problem in the case of CATIA V6 versus NX was that the DS solution required
the purchase and use of Dassault's PLM-PDM software, Enovia V6.
In this discussion it became clear to us that with Enovia V6, as it is today, it would not

be possible to support the sophisticated technological processes we have in Daimler,

says professor Katzenbach. Furthermore, if we should have chosen CATIA V6, Enovia
V6 was mandatory. We would have been forced to run two PLM-PDM systems
(Teamcenter and Enovia) in parallel, which would have cost double the money.
Organizationally, the roll-out of NX is being conducted through a sophisticated project
plan. The German car manufacturer has appointed special "rollout managers" who
ensure that the migration process is executed. The training programs are role-based
and tailored to the different departments' needs.
Long-term commitment
There's no doubt that Daimler's NX commitment is long-term. They have signed a ten
year agreement with Siemens PLM. Dassault Systemes also acquired orders for new
software (CATIA, ENOVIA and the digital manufacturing solution Delmia) from Daimler
during the transitional period, but a qualified guess is that this stream will slowly dry up.
The fact that Siemens PLM has both NX and their PLM Teamcenter suite in place at
Daimler makes their already strong position in the German automotive industry even
stronger. With PLM (Teamcenter) customers like Daimler and the giant VAG Group
(Volkswagen AG) they are as dominant on the cPDM side as DS CATIA is on CAD.
Siemens PLM's chief executive, Chuck Grindstaff, seems confident:
He said that the increasing complexity of vehicle design and development has forced
many automotive companies to evaluate their existing systems to ensure that they use
the premier technology solution. Daimler is no exception...

By the end of March 2015 the CATIA environment was completely replaced such that all
designs will be done in NX. It's obvious that there must have been huge gains promised
to make Daimler Mercedes launch this project.
In the end, the change has proven to be worth the effort. The Daimler Mercedes PLM
organization found ways to deal with the problems that arose along the way. The experience
we had with our collegues from Siemens PLM is that success demands quick responses to fix a
problem as soon as it occurs. Pitfalls were expected and the PLM department at Daimler
reacted to address those challenges.

How Kodak Failed

A generation ago, a Kodak moment meant something that was worth
saving and savoring. Unfortunately, as time marches on the subtleties of

what actually happened to Eastman Kodak are being forgotten, leading

executives to draw the wrong conclusions from its struggles.
Given that Kodaks core business was selling film, it is not hard to see why
the last few decades proved challenging. Cameras went digital and then
disappeared into cellphones. People went from printing pictures to sharing
them online. Sure, people print nostalgic books and holiday cards, but that
volume pales in comparison to Kodaks heyday. The company filed for
bankruptcy protection in 2012, exited legacy businesses and sold off its
patents before re-emerging as a sharply smaller company in 2013. Once one
of the most powerful companies in the world, today the company has a
market capitalization of less than $1 billion.
Why did this happen?
An easy explanation is myopia. Kodak was so blinded by its success that it
completely missed the rise of digital technologies. But that doesnt square
with reality. After all, the first prototype of a digital camera was created in
1975 by Steve Sasson, an engineer working for Kodak. The camera was as
big as a toaster, took 20 seconds to take an image, had low quality, and
required complicated connections to a television to view, but it clearly had
massive disruptive potential.
Spotting something and doing something about it are very different things.
So, another explanation is that Kodak invented the technology but didnt
invest in it. Doing something and doing the right thing are also different
things. The next explanation is that Kodak mismanaged its investment in
digital cameras, overshooting the market by trying to match performance of
traditional film rather than embrace the simplicity of digital. That criticism
perhaps held in early iterations of Kodaks digital cameras (the $20,000 DCS100, for example), but Kodak ultimately embraced simplicity, carving out a
strong market position with technologies that made it easy to move pictures
from cameras to computers.
All of that is moot, the next argument goes, because the real disruption
occurred when cameras merged with phones, and people shifted from
printing pictures to posting them on social media and mobile phone apps.
And Kodak totally missed that.
But it didnt, entirely.
Before Mark Zuckerberg wrote a line of Facebooks code, Kodak made a
prescient purchase, acquiring a photo sharing site called Ofoto in 2001. It

was so close. Imagine if Kodak had truly embraced its historical tagline of
share memories, share life. Perhaps it could have rebranded Ofoto as
Kodak Moments, making it the pioneer of a new category called life
networking where people could share pictures, personal updates, and links to
news and information.
In real life, unfortunately, Kodak used Ofoto to try to get more people to print
digital images. It sold the site to Shutterfly as part of its bankruptcy plan for
less than $25 million in April 2012. That same month Facebook plunked down
$1 billion to acquire Instagram, the 13-employee company Systrom had cofounded 18 months earlier.
There were other ways in which Kodak could have emerged from the digital
disruption of its core business. Consider Fuji Photo Film. in the 1980s Fuji was
a distant second in the film business to Kodak. While Kodak stagnated and
ultimately stumbled, Fuji aggressively explored new opportunities, creating
products adjacent to its film business, such as magnetic tape optics and
videotape, and branching into copiers and office automation, notably through
a joint venture with Xerox. Today the company has annual revenues above
$20 billion, competes in healthcare and electronics operations and derives
significant revenues from document solutions.
The right lessons from Kodak are subtle. Kodak created a digital camera, invested in
the technology, and even understood that photos would be shared online. Where
they failed was in realizing that online photo sharing was the new business, not just
a way to expand the printing business. Kodak managements inability to see digital

photography as a disruptive technology, even as its researchers extended the

boundaries of the technology, was the direct cause of Kodaks decades-long
decline as digital photography destroyed its film-based business model.
Kodak remains a sad story of potential lost. The American icon had the talent, the
money, and even the foresight to make the transition. Instead it ended up the
victim of the aftershocks of a disruptive change. Learn the right lessons, and you
can avoid its fate.

Barabba argues that four interrelated capabilities are necessary to enable

effective enterprise-wide decision-makingnone of which were particularly wellrepresented during pivotal decisions at Kodak:
1. Having an enterprise mindset that is open to change.Unless
those at the top are sufficiently open and willing to consider all options, the
decision-making process soon gets distorted. Kodaks management in the 80s
and 90s were unwilling to consider digital as a replacement for film. This limited
them to a fundamentally flawed path.
2. Thinking and acting holistically.Separating out and then optimizing
different functions usually reduces the effectiveness of the whole. In Kodaks
case, management did a reasonable job of understanding how the parts of the
enterprise interacted within the framework of the existing technology. There was,
however, little appreciation for the effort being conducted in the Kodak Research
Labs with digital technology.
3. Being able to adapt the business design to changing
conditions. The right design depends on the predictability of the market.
Kodaks unwillingness to change its large and highly efficient ability to makeand-sell film in the face of developing digital technologies lost it the chance to
adopt an anticipate-and-lead design that could have secured it a leading position
in digital image processing.
4. Making decisions interactively using a variety of methods.
This refers to the ability to incorporate a range of sophisticated decision
supporttools when tackling complex business problems. Kodak had a very effect
decision support process in place but failed to use that information effectively.