This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

Tag Line: What’s it Worth to You for You to be the Key to Producing High Quality Products and Services for your Customers? And have Fun doing it … Come with Us

Mark Zebrowski will present 2 papers, one as a Presentation – one as a Workshop. With the same titles and tag lines. But with an increased level of content and detail during the workshop.

Simulation, as a tool for functional performance evaluation, has been used in the engineering community since the late-1960's and has experienced rapid growth during the last two decades. However, its effectiveness as a tool to replace physical testing widely varies from company to company and across various functional attributes. Like many computer-based techniques, its return on investment (ROI) has been somewhat less than initially promised and the confidence and trust in its predictive capability is, in many instances, not sufficient for companies to move to a virtual predictive world from physical testing. These presentations propose that further advancement in Simulation will be the result of, not from further technological and/or software development, but from a shift in thinking – in not treating Simulation as a technology, but as a business – in treating Simulation not as a "craftspersons" or "analysts" tool, but as a general engineering tool – in treating Simulation not as a craft, but as a robust, repetitive, consistent production business – in growing Simulation so that, in the face of constantly increasing demand, it can be scaled to meet the demand at high levels of quality.

Mark will discuss
1) Why a 5 Decades View Point on Simulation is Necessary
2) What’s Currently Wrong with Simulation
3) Why Companies that Seem Well Positioned with People, Processes, Tools and Methods can produce Poor Quality Predictions
4) What Happens? - When (If?) The Prediction Quality is Discovered
5) Why we tend to Produce Laundry List of Tactics – and Call them Strategies
6) How do We Produce A True Solution – A Leader’s Solution - A Grand Strategy, Sub-Strategies, Tactics, and Operations
7) What the “New World” Looks Like
8) Our Call to Action – Don’t Expect a “Silver Bullet” or One “App” to Cure your Strategic Deficiencies - It Takes Multiple Technologies - It Takes a Vision, a Grand Strategy to Make it Happen

Simulation is sometimes relegated to the sidelines of product development as companies wait in anticipation for software providers to come up with that “one thing” in terms of features and functions that will show them the way to improved quality, reduced cost structures and quicker time-to-market for innovative products. This narrow view, focusing on tactical elements only, has its roots in the early days of Simulation, when companies were concerned about details such as element formulations, mesh generation speeds and compute power and other technology-related topics of endless debate. Some remain stuck in this time warp, still searching for newer and better technology when experience has shown that tactical solutions alone won’t solve a company’s strategic and operational problems. Significant changes in Simulation implementation come about when you begin to broaden your view in considering what’s really important for Simulation: the overriding strategy of establishing Simulation Processes and integrating them into Product Development.. In this broader view, the role of Simulation is elevated to that of a general engineering tool, not just one to be used exclusively by “craftspersons” and dedicated analysts.

Mark Zebrowski (markzebrowski1625@gmail.com) spent 32 years working in Simulation at Ford Motor Company and was a technical manager for 12 years prior to his retirement in 2005.