Industry 4.0 is now all the news, and players in the sector are focusing their entire attention on the quest for communications and technical data management solutions. Competition on the global CAD-CAM market has heated up, with some major mergers between service providers in recent years. We spoke to Richard Lamure, the director of TopSolid, one of the world’s leading publishers of CAD-CAM/ERP software, to try and understand this broad trend towards emulation.

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TopSolid was founded in 1984 by the Missler brothers and Michel Goujon. Under Richard Lamure’s management, today, the company has branches all over France and can call on an international distribution network of resellers and partners. With 325 employees, 100,000 licenses sold the world over and six international subsidiaries in China, Italy, Switzerland, the USA, Brazil and Turkey, TopSolid is a major actor in CAD-CAM/ERP software and posted revenues of €45 million in 2018.
35 years of experience and the range of TopSolid CAD, CAM and ERP solutions enable the publisher to cover numerous sectors with its dedicated software, from aerospace and transport, to general mechanics, furniture, medical equipment, energy, tools, metal work, boiler work and education. Wherever machinery interacts with materials to machine, shape or produce a part, TopSolid can propose personalized solutions to meet its customers’ needs. The company mainly targets the mechanical sector, sheet metal work and the wood industry. It is also the only publisher that has developed a fully integrated CAD-CAM solution for wood. TopSolid’Wood can be used to manage complete projects, from the preliminary design phase to production.

A French publisher close at hand

The company’s priority is to offer personalized support to its customers for their digital transformation. The digitalization of production centers will be the major challenge in the years to come, which is the reason why TopSolid has opted to get close to its customers. 
The numerous branches all over France can provide their customers with support throughout the entire process, from employee training, to the installation of new design and manufacturing tools. This common-sense approach runs counter to the philosophy of a market where a large majority of competitors prefer to operate as intermediary resellers of foreign solutions. On the contrary, TopSolid positions itself as a French publisher with the guaranteed know-how offered by a domestic production chain. The company offers an alternative to an obsolete model, in which end customers do not deal with the publishers, but with external resellers, and are often left to their own devices by uninterested intermediaries. 
“Our support-based model is bearing fruit. We collaborate with many companies in a broad range of sectors of activity. With more than 35 years of experience, we have the possibility to see further ahead. We are in the process of replicating this model in other countries and developing our local services in order to offer responsive support that meets the needs of our international customers,” concludes Richard Lamure.

Media source: "Informations Entreprise" magazine

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