I got the opportunity to work on a practical engineering challenge based on the SAE TIFAN Automatic Multi Vegetable Transplanter.

What interested me most about this project was that it wasn’t simply about designing a machine. It was about understanding how an engineering requirement gradually becomes a product.

I started by studying the competition requirements and breaking them down into key product needs — functionality, operating conditions, performance, manufacturability, and overall system requirements.

From there, I began building a structured product definition: understanding what the machine needed to achieve, how different systems would interact, and how those requirements would eventually translate into engineering design decisions.

Using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, I explored how product information and engineering data can be organized throughout the development process, while beginning the mechanical development of the transplanter in CATIA.

One of my biggest learnings from this stage was simple:

A product is not just a 3D model.

The product structure, engineering data, design versions, collaboration, and traceability are equally important when developing a real product.

This experience helped me look at mechanical design beyond geometry — as a connected process from requirements to product definition and eventually design.

This was my starting point in exploring the project through the Dassault Systèmes ecosystem.

Requirements → Product Definition → Design

In the next post, I’ll share how I translated these requirements into the mechanical design of the automatic vegetable transplanter, and how the design evolved from concept to a functional engineering product.

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SAE TIFAN 2026 Rulebook