Intense competition across industries is pushing organizations to continuously innovate and bring smarter, safer, and more cost-efficient products to market. To achieve these goals, engineering, and simulation teams need to rapidly create, evaluate, and compare multiple design alternatives within an integrated digital environment.
However, a major obstacle lies in the lack of integration between tools and teams. Designers and simulation specialists often work in isolated systems without a shared platform, resulting in poor collaboration and significant delays in the product development cycle.
Customer expectations and competitive pressure require industries to bring products to market faster while maintaining high quality, reliability, and cost efficiency. Sectors such as automotive and aerospace depend heavily on their suppliers to support these objectives and deliver compliant, high-quality components. Nowadays, equipment and machinery are designed in CAD and validated through simulation, with suppliers using their own CAD applications for design and engineering tasks. As a result, product information is typically exchanged via drawings and neutral CAD formats such as STEP.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform delivers a powerful, unified solution by offering a fully integrated multi-CAD environment for both design and simulation, even for customers working with third-party CAD systems such as Creo, NX, or Inventor. This capability allows users to seamlessly utilize multi-CAD data for modeling and analysis, enabling comprehensive design trade-off evaluations and supporting optimization efforts to achieve the highest product quality.
Multi-CAD supported list
Without the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, ensuring access to the most current revisions of multiple 3D models can be difficult, increasing the risk of assembling outdated or mismatched components. The platform addresses this challenge through its built-in collaboration capabilities, enabling teams to work efficiently with accurate, up-to-date data. It offers native connectors for most leading 3D CAD systems, as well as 2D design tools such as AutoCAD and DraftSight. In addition, electronic design data from Altium Designer can be seamlessly integrated into the 3DEXPERIENCE environment.
Currently, supported authoring tools include:
OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) historically depended heavily on PDM (product data management) systems; however, limitations in scalability, collaboration, and data continuity led to the early adoption of PLM (product lifecycle management) solutions.
A critical challenge arises in managing version and revision control between internal design data and supplier-provided data, particularly when suppliers maintain independent revision repositories. This often results in inconsistencies, traceability gaps, and synchronization issues across the supply chain.
An additional complexity within large enterprises is the coexistence of multiple CAD authoring systems used for different engineering domains and project requirements. Organizations such as JLR, Tata Motors, and Boeing typically operate heterogeneous CAD and PLM landscapes across various programs and product portfolios.
For example, mechanical engineering data may be developed in one CAD system, while electrical or electronic design is managed in another. These disparate tool chains generate fragmented datasets that must interface with PDM or PLM systems, increasing integration overhead and data inconsistency risks.
To address these challenges and enable a true digital twin strategy, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a comprehensive solution by natively managing and integrating data from multiple CAD and engineering sources within a unified, collaborative environment. This ensures data consistency, traceability, and lifecycle continuity across disciplines and stakeholders.
The capabilities of the platform are demonstrated through the following example. A single assembly is created by integrating components authored in multiple CAD systems, including CATIA V5, Creo, NX, Solid Edge, SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, and native 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA parts. Each component retains the full set of attributes, parameters, and metadata from its originating CAD system. Additionally, components can be created directly within the 3DEXPERIENCE web-based environment and subsequently modified in their respective native authoring tools.
Bi-directional interoperability between 3DEXPERIENCE and external CAD applications is enabled through dedicated connector tools. As illustrated, components originating from different CAD systems coexist within a single assembly structure. While each component follows the revision scheme of its source application, all revisions are centrally managed and governed within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
Revision control is facilitated through application connectors and the 3DEXPERIENCE “Work Under” mechanism, which allows users to implement design changes within a controlled change action while working in their native CAD environment. This approach ensures that all modifications and revisions are captured, tracked, and synchronized within 3DEXPERIENCE, thereby establishing a reliable single source of truth across the enterprise.
Although the objects are managed within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, their native authoring formats remain intact and can be identified in the object properties under the “CAD Extension” attribute, which explicitly indicates the originating CAD system.
All standard capabilities of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform function identically for both native 3DEXPERIENCE objects and non-3DEXPERIENCE CAD objects. Applications such as IP Classification for managing standard and reusable libraries, Change Execution for controlled change management, and Model Definition for variant and configuration management operate seamlessly across all object types. As a result, there are no compatibility concerns when leveraging 3DEXPERIENCE features with data originating from other CAD systems.