Design Rule delivers the essential professional services to assist in the requirements definition, design, implementation & deployment of Dassault Systemes PLM solutions, SmarTeam & CATIA. We are able to support business process re-engineering initiatives, e.g. Lean Engineering; leveraging our extensive experience of what is both good and bad practice across multiple industries. We deliver thought leadership in how best to fully exploit your PLM investment with the implementation of phased and practical deployments.

We believe it is critical to the success of any PLM project that our consultants should be free to challenge the ‘sacred cows’ that exist in most companies; our experience shows that many current practices within companies exist for reasons that are now outdated. We see our role is to encourage the adoption of objective best practices from all industries and, where possible and applicable, to integrate these within the customers existing business process framework.

Business Review and Cost Justification

• The review and adaptation of New Product Introduction (NPI) procedures including the management of change.
• The specification and implementation of any required changes to working practices.
• Management Awareness seminars.

Cost Justification workshops to measure the costs associated with existing processes and identify the savings and opportunities that can be realized with an investment in PLM. This is essential to justify to board level the investment in money and resource that PLM requires. It also creates a baseline against which future improvements can be measured.

Requirements Definition

• The development of company wide PLM & Configuration Management processes in conjunction with existing legacy data sources & CAD systems
• The definition and development of Bid Management, etc.Capturing your specific NPI processes / APQP gates
• Definition of company wide Engineering Change and Release processes
• Specification of integration with company's software application tools, e.g. CAD, ERP, etc
• The development of a strategy for supply chain integration
• The development of training programs to support deployment rollout.

Design & Implementation

• Encapsulating your business objects and processes in the SmarTeam datamodel
• Defining the numbering and revisioning masks to suit NPI requirements
• Advising on user methodology approaches
• Delivering internal ‘continuous improvement’ capability with full systems knowledge transfer

Project Managment

• Planning, co-ordination and management of PLM project deployment.