Today’s manufacturing companies face a three-tiered dilemma. Product development cycles need to be dramatically reduced to remain competitive. At the same time products are increasing in complexity while development budgets and resources remain static or are being decreased. This means that current tools and processes need to be fully examined and innovation becomes a critical priority.
How important is innovation? According to the Strategic Management Journal, for thought leaders in the industry, innovation is nothing short of critical. The journal’s recent report: The effect of introducing important incremental innovations on market share and business survival offers a direct and measurable correlation between innovation and market share: “The more often an industry incumbent was among the first to introduce important incremental product innovations the greater its market share, while adopting innovations that had been introduced by competitors had a small positive relationship with greater market share. The greater the number of competitors that introduced similar products, the greater the market share of firms that were first to market.”
Whether you’re talking about incremental design enhancements, exciting next generation products, or simply optimizing development time and costs, today’s product development processes hinge largely on both expanding and expediting the interaction between design and analysis. With simulation as the key to new product innovation, for these benefits to materialize, simulation results reporting must be fast, accurate, and useful to design teams.
The VCollab Solution
VCollab represents a new class of tool for maximizing the value of simulation results on achieving product success and increasing innovation. By delivering live, interactive 3D simulation results, stakeholders throughout the company can quickly access and understand what these results mean.
These rich 3D simulation results automatically point out hotspots while allowing results to be explored via panning, zooming and animation. What’s more, these results can be delivered in a lightweight format accessible even through standard web browsers and containing all of the important model information. The Rapid Results Review provided by this new class of tool enables faster and more accurate decision-making which is key to addressing today’s 3-tiered dilemma.
Example: GKN
GKN Automotive is an example of one organization leveraging VCollab CAE reporting technology. Prior to implementation, GKN’s CAE reporting process was not unlike most others. The process was repetitive, manually intensive, and the potential for error was always present.
VCollab provides GKN design teams with greater design insight into simulation results while saving the analysis team a substantial amount of time and providing greater design insight into simulation results by automatically locating hotspots via data mining.
Before implementing VCollab, GKN simulation experts created 10 different output files for review. Each mode shape and animation were contained in a separate file and viewing the files required end-users to have special software installed.
After VCollab, all 10 animated mode shapes are contained in a single, automatically generated file with substantially less effort. Now end users can view the information in an HTML browser with no special software required.
Today, VCollab is delivering substantial returns for GKN. The company’s Knowledge-based Engineering Manager summed things up in this way:
“VCollab has more than lived up to our expectations for making it faster and easier to create simulation reports. Instead of spending additional time producing slide decks of static 2D results for our customers, VCollab lets us quickly and easily create 3D results which they can pan, zoom, rotate and animate to understand the simulation more completely and thoroughly. This has led to better and faster design decision-making.”
Bridging the Chasm
Today collaboration technologies like VCollab are allowing companies to compress product development cycles while advancing product quality and innovation. What once took days or weeks to create, share and understand simulation results can now deliver the information critical to product development decisions in time to meet today’s market conditions.
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