3D design with collaboration in the cloud

The Swiss company Louis Bélet S.A spotted the trend and has switched its product development to Solid Edge Xcelerator Share (XaaS). A good decision. Because the new subscription license model features a whole host of advantages and cloud components compared to the regular version. And once again, MAIT was at the company’s side during this important step toward digital transformation.

Search and selection process

Louis Bélet S.A, based in Vendlincourt in the Swiss canton of Jura near the French border, has specialized in the manufacture of precision cutting tools for almost 75 years. The company's continuously growing product portfolio includes various milling cutters, drills, and thread cutters. Some 170 employees manufacture the products on numerous cutting and grinding machines over a production area of almost 3,200 square meters. Louis Bélet's foremost goal is to ensure full and lasting customer satisfaction. And this primarily depends on outstanding product quality resulting from high-precision manufacturing. That’s why the Swiss company has long relied on one of the world's leading innovators in the field of digitalization and automation in industry for its software: Siemens Digital Industries Software. The Siemens SolidEdge product development software in particular has proved its worth at Louis Bélet. Solid Edge offers manufacturing companies of all sizes and specializations a broad portfolio for development and manufacturing.

Siemens speeds up the move to cloud-based Xcelerator Share

In the beginning, Louis Bélet purchased conventional Solid Edge perpetual licenses and installed the software on desktop computers. However, with recent developments moving away from perpetual licensing, Siemens is following this trend and will in future offer all its software solutions predominantly as Xcelerator as a Service (XaaS) on a subscription basis. In other words, a fundamental change that affects more than just Solid Edge. And a trend that many other software providers are also pursuing with their solutions. Even though, in the specific case of Solid Edge, it would still be some time before the final transition, Louis Bélet wanted to break with the customary conventional licensing as quickly as possible. And for good reason: Siemens XaaS offers a number of decisive advantages. These include greater flexibility, higher data security, guaranteed availability of all data, and cloud-based possibilities for collaborating on joint projects with customers and suppliers.

Siemens also keen to ensure a smooth transition

Louis Bélet was the first Swiss customer to rely on MAIT's expertise when switching to the XaaS subscription of Siemens Solid Edge. So even Siemens kept a close eye on developments. The manufacturer wanted to find out how the planned processes would work in practice. The simple answer in Louis Bélet's case: very well. In fact, none of the users noticed the changeover at all. The only thing that took more time and effort was amending the existing maintenance contracts with MAIT, but that was largely an administrative matter. 

"Once again, MAIT impressively demonstrated that it is not without reason that the company has been our most valuable partner in this area for many years. The changeover to the new software model went very smoothly," says Roxane Piquerez, who has been managing the Louis Bélet business together with Arnaud Maître since 2008. 

The new solution: highly flexible and collaborative

Using the Siemens XaaS services will make Louis Bélet much more flexible in the future. The company can quickly add additional features for product development or disable them again as required. The change of license also gives Louis Bélet access to special software training courses. In addition, the company can now use the Siemens cloud storage space, including the Xcelerator Share collaboration tool. This sharing platform allows several design engineers to collaborate in real time on one and the same development project. It is also easy to integrate customers or external service providers, for example to make large amounts of data available to them or to obtain feedback and approvals.

Fit for tomorrow

"By switching to the Siemens XaaS services in terms of licensing, Louis Bélet is clearly moving towards what the future of production will look like," says Robin Vornholt from the Business Unit Siemens at MAIT. Together with the expertise of the MAIT hotline, the future-proofing of the company will continue to be ensured in all Swiss national languages. For example, Siemens Teamcenter is to be introduced for product lifecycle management. Directly as an XaaS solution, of course.