Business Challenges

The focus of this ASSESS Initiative theme is to investigate issues and to develop approaches to defining the business value of engineering simulation, best practices to realizing that value, and transforming business models to enable a significant increase in usage and benefit of engineering simulation software tools.

The changing role of engineering simulation is really about business drivers for improved competitiveness.

• Increase Innovation
• Increase Performance
• Improve Quality/Risk Management
• Reduce Time
• Reduce Cost

Engineering simulation is a major key to all 5 business drivers in providing better understanding of product and process behaviour, variability and risk. However, engineering simulation software is still typically used only by expert analysts and we need to expand the usage to a broader audience for companies to truly capture the value that engineering simulation can offer. This expansion has many technical issues addressed by other ASSESS Initiative themes and NAFEMS working groups, however, significantly broader usage of engineering simulation software also has many business challenges.

The ASSESS Initiative has initially outlined seven major contributing factors to engineering simulation business challenges as follows:

1. Understanding and explaining the engineering simulation value proposition
2. Identifying and communicating best practices for realizing the business value engineering simulation can provide
3. Communicating with non-technical executives
4. Changing licensing models
5. Understanding the impact of cloud/mobile access
6. Developing the role of untapped subject matter experts
7. Enabling broader usage of engineering simulation at SMEs

The ASSESS Initiative will explore the different factors related to engineering simulation business challenges in order to provide understanding and guidance moving forward.