Today’s CAE teams are being asked to do more studies annually all while delivering results in less time to their design stakeholders and often with no headcount increase. Let’s look at the automotive industry as an example:
- Compressed Program Timing: New automotive EV programs are being delivered in 20-24 months as compared to 36 months just a few years ago.
- Reduced Physical Testing: Physical testing is being replaced by a “virtual testing”, that significantly eliminates the old time consuming and expensive hardware testing process. This is critical for reducing cost and development time.
- Increased Product Complexity: Then add in increasing product complexity with more electronics, including e-Drives, EV batteries and software…again adding more requirements on CAE teams to test digitally.
Together these factors create a situation where CAE teams are under tremendous pressure to deliver more design insights, faster after result files are created. Analysts need a more efficient process to go from native result files to post-processed information that identifies where the product is not meeting targets. Traditional, manual, use of legacy post-processing tools and 2D PowerPoint based reporting processes are not capable of keeping up with the increasing workloads Analysts face in today’s environment.
VCollab– A New Class of Tool
VCollab’s combination of off-the-shelf “Intelligent Automation” and customized automation templates provide our “Rapid Results Review” capability, enabling the fast, interactive communication required to stay on schedule with today’s accelerated program timing. CAE Analysts can go from raw results to fully post-processed 3D digital slides in seconds. This type of automation removes the current repetitive, boring work of post-processing and report writing for the CAE Analyst while allowing them to apply their unique engineering judgement skills to more iterations of results.
VCollab delivers a new class of tool that helps simulation teams automate post-processing, failure identification, and creates 3D digital slides for use in Design Review presentations and sharing with design stakeholders. By delivering live, interactive 3D simulation results, stakeholders throughout the company can quickly access and understand what these results mean, enabling them to make faster, well informed design decisions.
What’s more, results can be delivered in HTML format accessible through standard web browsers and containing all of the important model information. These 3D digital slides allow interaction with the results via panning, zooming, animation, and probing.
Example: GKN Automotive
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.”
Faster Design Decisions
Today, VCollab’s unique capabilities allow companies to improve Analyst productivity by 60-95% in the post-processing and report writing steps. What once took days to create and share simulation results with design stakeholders, can now be delivered in minutes. VCollab’s interactive 3D digital slides allow design teams to better understand what the Analyst is sharing with them, enabling a faster, more well-informed design decision to be made.
Contact us here to learn more.
Recent Comments