Software team draws up success by design

An Irish company hopes its 3D tool will transform maintenance work from airlines to Ikea, writes John Murray Brown

Francis Bernard recently retired from Dassault Systemes, the software offshoot he helped take to the public markets. But he is not putting his feet up just yet. A veteran software engineer, Mr. Bernard is widely credited as the inventor of three-dimensional computer-aided design (3D CAD). Catia, the product he deleloped when he worked for the French aircraft maker, is still the industry standard for creating fighter aircraft and other highly engineered products. The 66 year old Frenchman is now embracing a fresh challenge as head of a company that is taking the technology he pioneered 30 years ago and exploiting its potential as a maintenance tool for airlines and as a sales aid for component parts makers.

The experience of ParallelGraphics illustrates that even a small company, headquartered in a basement office in Dublin, can create an international organization, with its product manufacturing in a separate country and its marketing effort spread across Europe and the US. Although aircraft today are designed using 3D, the after-sales side - maintenance, training and other activities - relies on a 2D flat view. ParallelGraphics' product (Cortona3D) captures all the detail a mechanic would need but in a form that is lightweight enough to be downloaded from the internet or stored on a handheld device.

"Today if you worked as a mechanic at Dublin airport and you had to change the outflow valve on an Airbus, what you would have is a manual, which is not very different from when you buy a washing machine." With Cortona3D software," says Mr Gallagher, "I have my PC, maybe I can even use a palm held. I type in the name of the aeroplane and select the assembly and I will see our product."

For Mr Bernard, applying 3D software to the after-sales market is a logical step in the history of the application of design. He likes to recall that Leonardo Da Vinci used to illustrate his industrial inventions with complicated sketches that perhaps only he really understood. "Without the drawing, there would be no way to have big groups of people designing complex products like the first trains, the first aircraft," he says.

Other companies are developing similar software. But ParallelGraphics’ product is already in use in Boeing and Airbus and the company is in discussion with other large aerospace manufacturers and component makers. The next step is to take it to the airlines.