Case Study: Ford Motor Company accelerates powertrain design and improves validation efficiency with Dassault Systèmes' CATIA and SIMULIA

Accelerates powertrain design with CATIA and SIMULIA

Ford Motor Company needed to accelerate powertrain product development by improving collaboration between engineers, designers, and CAE analysts. To do this they adopted Dassault Systemes solutions, migrating CAD to CATIA and using SIMULIA’s Abaqus for CATIA to integrate CAD geometry with FEA analysis.

Dassault Systemes implemented an integrated CAD/CAE environment plus reusable CAD and CAE templates that automated setup and created associativity between geometry and analysis. The changes cut development time dramatically—for example, oil filter adaptor cycle time fell by three to four weeks, cylinder head setup dropped from 1–2 days to under 30 minutes, connecting rod meshing from hours to ~10 minutes, and intake manifold meshing from three weeks to about two hours—while enabling global rollout, better workload balancing, and improved design validation efficiency.

Ford Motor Company

Jeffrey Bautz

Powertrain ADSS Manager