Understanding the Path to Realizable Business Benefits through Engineering Simulation - Executive Review

The objective of this Executive Review is to provide information and insights to Directors, Managers, and Executives on the topic of realizable business benefits through Engineering Simulation.

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Operating an effective and efficient Engineering Simulation infrastructure in your organization can provide a significant competitive advantage and help achieve business goals. The use of Engineering Simulation has grown steadily since its introduction around 70 years ago, but it is only during the last decade that it has been widely adopted as a key business activity.

The application of Engineering Simulation in a strategic business activity is rapidly becoming urgent.

1. Engineering Simulation is expanding at most companies but its use is still predominantly reactive and tactical with a focus on tool functionalities to improve past processes.
2. Groundbreaking changes in modeling knowledge and technology, product innovation and quality, staffing resource and competence availability, and understanding of business impact are enabling a paradigm shift in the way Engineering Simulation is viewed and the value it provides.
3. Engineering Simulation is a high-cost business asset that is too beneficial to business goals not to invest in a pro-active, direct business value based, strategic use providing for informed management decisions.
4. The strategic use of Engineering Simulation leads to a variety of business benefits:

a Reduced time to market
b Reduced cost
c Increased innovation & knowledge
d Improved quality & safety

Engineering Simulation that is performed strategically delivers value to product and process development, leading to improved business metrics, a better understanding of product and process function, a better knowledge of the physics behind products and even the creation of entirely new and innovative industrial segments.

Leading companies in multiple industries have made Engineering Simulation a core business practice, making extensive use of it in multiple aspects of the product lifecycle, and have achieved significant returns on their investments. Today, Engineering Simulation tools provide invaluable insight to everyone in a product development organization who is involved in investigating new concepts, developing and integrating designs, optimizing performance, ensuring quality, signing-off and certifying designs, and optimizing manufacturing processes. In fact, many products today could not be delivered without exploiting Engineering Simulation.

Engineering Simulation has evolved organically over many years within different industries and organizations, resulting in vast differences in how companies use Engineering Simulation.

The need to introduce ever more challenging and complex product technologies, the growing need for improving sustainability, the increasing applications of virtual digital models in support of lifecycle operations and maintenance, and the relentless drive to reduce costs and be faster to market mean Engineering Simulation is now critical to engineering, manufacturing, delivery, and operations in most organizations. It is more important than ever for companies to ensure that their virtual Engineering Simulation capabilities are well integrated into all levels of product and process development and lifecycle support processes.

This Executive Review and the associated Strategic Insight Paper explore and explain the Path to Realizable Business Benefits through Engineering Simulation and is organized into three major sections.

1. Understanding the business benefits enabled by Engineering Simulation
2. Achieving realizable business benefits through simulation requires a strategy
3. Engineering Simulation best practices to enable the realization of the business benefits

From a business perspective, Engineering Simulation is the use of models to understand how something behaves for the purpose of making informed decisions and generating intellectual property based on a better understanding and knowledge of the physics involved. It is essentially a virtual evaluation that replaces or complements physical tests in the development and verification of a product or process.

Acknowledgements 

The ASSESS Initiative would like to acknowledge the efforts of the Business Challenges Theme Committee for their contributions to advance this ASSESS theme and the development of this Executive Review of the associated Strategic Insight Paper. It would also like to acknowledge the efforts of those who participated in Working Sessions at the ASSESS annual Congresses on the Business Theme. 

The ASSESS Initiative would like to acknowledge specifically the following individuals for their efforts on this Executive Review of the associated ASSESS Strategic Insight Paper. 

Primary Author(s): 

• Roger Keene, NAFEMS 
• Mark Meili, Modeling Enabled Innovation, Leadership & Insight 
• Andy Richardson, Phronesim 
• Joe Walsh, intrinSIM 

Reviewers: 

• Mark Zebrowski, Owner, Lean Simulation LLC 
• Rod Dreisbach, NAFEMS Technical Fellow, Independent Engineering Consultant 
• Mark Palmer, ANSYS 
• Bob Tickel, Cummins