How Simulation Can Help the Bottom Line
What if you woke up tomorrow and you and your colleagues were all 500% more productive? What would it mean for your business? Would your company reduce its simulation workforce? Would you take on more of the same work or would you start new initiatives?
When I pose these questions to customers, most of them say they would do things differently.
Most companies that value simulation also know we have yet to fully capitalize its strategic potential, which is to use the scientific method to conduct thousands of numerical experiments throughout the development process in order to gain insight into product behavior by exploring diverse design alternatives and thoroughly optimizing the best designs.
You might consider this hypothetical outlandish. It’s not. Improved software usability, process automation, and increasing hardware and software performance contribute to significant productivity improvements every year.
Automating a CAE (computed-aided engineering) workflow can easily improve productivity for that workflow by a factor of 10 or more. For example, General Motors used an automated process to reduce analysis time from five days to around two hours. Brembo, a supplier of braking systems, implemented a CAE template and process distribution vision that enabled the company to tremendously increase the number of simulations over a 4-year period.
It’s not difficult to find other similar examples. With process integration tools like Isight, you can take an automated process and run hundreds or thousands of design variations with a single command and then easily sift through the results for the best and most robust option.
Missed Opportunity
If most companies could see significant productivity improvements each year, why isn’t every company embracing more simulation? Unfortunately, many simulation groups don’t do proper planning and investment. They and their organizations see simulation as a support function to product development rather than as a necessity, an overhead expense to be minimized rather than a potential strategic advantage.
The missed opportunity is these organizations primarily use simulation as a tool to reduce testing costs—which of course it is, but it is also much more. Simulation can be the primary source of insight for design ideation, concept development, lifecycle cost, and risk management.
Simulation can be the primary source of insight for design ideation, concept development, lifecycle cost, and risk management.
A good deal of the challenge to proper simulation planning and investment is organizational and managerial, not technical. Ironically, this is because many companies see simulation as too technical to be considered essential to corporate planning and something worthy of c-level interest. Typically, these companies delegate decisions about simulation software to technology experts in engineering departments with relatively little scrutiny from IT or corporate strategy.
An executive at an automobile company once quipped to me, “No one will look at one of our vehicles and say, ‘That’s obviously a product of superior information technology!’” That may have been true ten years ago, but no longer today. As product complexity increases, so must the simulation used to ensure these products succeed.
Better Collaboration
As the value of simulation grows and companies take notice, the ownership of a simulation strategy and how it impacts the overall corporate strategy can become a source of tension between engineering and IT, leading to dysfunctional decision making or inaction.
Generally, many companies need to improve engineering and IT collaboration to achieve the potential of simulation as an enterprise asset. Not only must these challenges and opportunities be addressed across corporate silos, they need to be addressed through true partnerships for simulation business transformation, where the relationship between the customer and solution provider goes beyond mere financial transactions.
At Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA, we are involved in such partnerships around the world with companies of all sizes. Part of our unique value is our deep knowledge of simulation technology and the change management issues associated with bringing simulation from a “nice-to-have” set of tools used solely by experts to a “must-have” source of business insight used by many.
No other company can bring so much knowledge to bear on building your simulation capability. The time for making tactical decisions about simulation is over.
Want to learn more?
Discover our portfolio of simulation technology, visit SIMULIA Realistic Simulation Solutions.
