Abstract

The competition for the design and manufacturing of the best-in-class automotive products is more intense than ever due to technological advances and increased customer expectations. As a result, companies across the automotive industry are looking for innovations to improve their product design and manufacturing cycle time, cost and quality, and CAE simulation innovations and their effective implementations have long been proven to be a key competitive advantage. CAE organizations are also facing pressure to become more competitive and efficient. CAE Management and technical experts must constantly address an ever-growing demand to deliver more analytical product design and manufacturing evaluations with little or no headcount increase, thus driving them to create and deploy more automated and simplified CAE methods, tools and processes. Many steps in the “end-to-end” simulation processes in using the commercially available CAE tools have been streamlined or automated, with the notable exception of post-processing and report generation. Today, post-processing & report generation are time-consuming due to the involvements of various manual processes and manipulations, and it consumes about 15-25% of highly skilled FEA analyst's time and yet often yields low-fidelity 2D reports to be shared. The purpose of this paper is to explore and demonstrate how CAE report automation using VCollab® - a report automation tool - and its associated 3D "Digital CAE Reports" will enable CAE analysts to speed up and streamline the way they process and share simulation results with the product design and manufacturing stakeholders. In addition, as compared to traditional 2D CAE reports, 3D "Digital CAE Reports" will allow CAE analysts to share a richer, clearer, interactive and animated report to enable engineers and the management to make better and more confident design and manufacturing decisions.