Electric vehicle innovator NIO needed to rollout an R&D platform to support its rapid global expansion. The company chose the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its Electro Mobility Accelerator industry solution to bring together different disciplines in its development and manufacturing teams.
Born from a growing concern about the high pollution levels in many cities across China—and worldwide - NIO hopes that when the car ownership experience exceeds expectations, electric vehicles will simply become the natural choice for everyone, leading to a more sustainable tomorrow. Hence, the electric automotive start-up’s Chinese name: Weilai, which translates as ‘blue sky coming.’
Since it was founded in 2014, the company has been building a new generation of electric road cars that deliver superior performance and unique user experiences, backed by its vision to help consumers rediscover the ‘joyful lifestyle’ of car ownership. More than just simply another premium electric carmaker, NIO wants to become the first “user enterprise” and is capitalizing on the huge changes underway in the automotive industry to change the way people perceive and use cars for the better.
The company chose the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as the foundation for its enterprise-wide research and development (R&D) activities.
“What is most important to NIO is time,” said Shengjun Wang, vice president of digital business development at NIO. “We carried out a systematic investigation into our new enterprise R&D platform and chose Dassault Systèmes’ industry-leading 3DEXPERIENCE platform with great confidence. Now, we have truly realized a global R&D strategy and our engineers in China, Germany and the US can work in a collaborative manner on new products and designs.”
The migration to the new platform took just four months, allowing NIO to get its designers and engineers up and running on the new solution as quickly as possible.
Before implementing the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, NIO’s designers and engineers worked in siloes, focused only on their local product development activities. Many processes were offline and paper-based, making it difficult for workers in different sites in China, the US and Europe to access the data they needed and share information.
“Our colleagues in North America were unable to track our progress,” Jiang said. “However, since using ENOVIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, collaboration is no longer a problem. We’re able to update files from any of our locations, and when we need to make decisions in meetings, we know we’re working from the same page, which significantly improves our efficiency.”
Now that NIO has a complete overview of its operations, the company can keep projects on track, helping to reduce development cycles.
“With ENOVIA, rapid collaboration is enabled across different disciplines of our design team, as well as between development and manufacturing,” Wang said. “Our engineers can quickly access complete vehicle data at any time and verify the vehicle’s digital mockup, saving huge amounts of time. We also can identify and solve issues at the earliest stage of development with simulation and collaboration. This shortens our development cycle and allows us to work far more efficiently.”
To learn more about how NIO is using ENOVIA and DELMIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to charge ahead:
Read the case study
View the executive video
View the user video
Customer_Story
