Implementing Simulation-Driven Design: How to Manage the Transition
Introducing simulation-driven design offers a range of tangible business benefits, but it also means fundamental changes for the way your design unit and your CAE teams collaborate.
This change has to be actively navigated and closely monitored. As in any transition, clear strategies and a carefully considered approach are decisive for maximizing potential.
This requires modern, connected collaboration that takes full account of the strategic importance of modeling and simulation throughout the entire product creation process. A culture of collaboration that encourages the sharing of knowledge and offers each individual participant a secure space for personal development.
The following hints will show you how to effectively communicate with your teams during the transition process.
Tip #1: Communicating the Benefits
Let your stakeholders know that simulation will remain a specialist discipline. Even after the transition, methodology development and sophisticated modeling will require long-term training and deep expertise with the highly specialized software. Your designers won’t have to conduct multi-physical simulations, and your CAE team won’t become insignificant.
Rather, your simulation specialists will be able to concentrate more on their most important task: to fully exploit the potential that MODSIM holds for your business. Your simulation specialist won’t be replaced but instead relieved of certain burdens.
Highly standardized simulation tasks, e.g. buckling load or tension analyses needed to determine the structural-mechanical layout of components, will shift to the development division – a distinct benefit for your designers. Their new tools will let them generate even better designs and make a measurable contribution to project success, e.g. thanks to shorter development times or more robust designs.
Tip #2: Building Security
Security derives from clarity. Handouts detailing best practices, terminology and standards guide your teams as they move forward. To keep your projects on target, we also recommend regular reviews and validation exercises to make sure that your designers have the right information, that the software is calibrated correctly, and that the processes and results are congruent with the overall strategy of your simulation unit.
Tip #3: Promoting Teambuilding
Modeling and simulation can only unfold their full potential when business units think and work in a thoroughly connected manner. For this reason, you should promote knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration, so that traditional “that’s yours, this is mine” thought patterns are replaced by a sense of unity.
Assemble project teams that bundle knowledge from design, simulation and other disciplines. This will promote holistic approaches and make room for innovative ideas. Because of the new level of trust, processes can be adapted more flexibly and challenges will be overcome more efficiently.
Tip #4: Promoting Knowledge Transfer
When introducing your design unit to the new simulation tools, be sure that all users are thoroughly familiar with their operation and understand their fundamental context. Training courses and topical workshops encourage communication between your simulation experts and designers, strengthening shared software competence and promoting knowledge transfer between teams.
External presentations and innovation workshops also help to foster new perspectives and lend new impulses to your development processes.
Tip #5: Using the Right Software
Simulation-driven design needs the right tools. These applications should be integrated seamlessly with all ongoing CAD workflows and be intuitively usable. The goal is to minimize complexity for the designers, enabling them to solve tasks reliably and quickly
From a business perspective, it’s equally important to ensure that the simulation results feed into the collaborative process of product creation and become available within core systems like your PDM and PLM platforms. Additionally, automated workflows for standard tasks can boost efficiency and serve to accelerate the entire process.
