This paper on "Business Benefits of Simulation the Manager's Perspective" was presented at the NAFEMS World Congress on The Evolution of Product Simulation From Established Methods to Virtual Testing & Prototyping - 24-28 April 2001, The Grand Hotel, Lake Como, Italy.

Summary

It is no surprise that any company in the world is facing to an ever increasingly competitive marketplace with new technologies and processes driving the engineering cycle. From the boardrooms of the CEOs to the offices of the design floor, everyone has to deal with those all too familiar words resounding through the ranks: "Shorten the product development cycle" [1], [2], [3]. These demands are placing a squeeze on the design cycle in order to achieve time-to-market reductions. New modes of operation are being implemented and required by engineering departments as they face internal and external pressures. Efficiencies in methods, hardware, software and shared communication/information systems are becoming the standard. In particular the multi-partnered collaborative design optimisation is the key area for future industrial competitiveness, which requires leading edge capabilities to provide improved design whilst significantly reducing costs and time to market. But what does "collaborative design optimisation" mean? How is it structured? What resources are required?
Here the main issues which support the collaborative design optimisation process are dealt with mainly in the perspective of the computer simulated soft prototyping approach.