Abstract

Manufacturing companies look at reliable digital technologies to address increasing product complexity, innovate the engineering design process and reduce investment in physical prototypes. The ability to use simulation and perform design space exploration studies usually remains in the domain of a relatively small group of simulation experts too often isolated from the rest of the organization. Regardless of the adoption of Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) systems, there is still a siloed approach to share projects and results. Simulation models are sent by emails or placed on a shared drive with no version control, and disconnected from a common repository with other actors involved in the product development. The lack of a digital infrastructure that enables model integration and interconnectivity makes it difficult to share requirements, design objectives, constraints, simulation models and optimization results across the extended enterprise. Without a representation of the flow of activities and data in place, decision makers struggle to access the key product metrics that might be the results of design optimization studies over all stages of the product development. What if you could break technical silos across engineering disciplines and ensure corporate knowledge is captured and re-used to drive business decisions? What if you could make simulation routine analysis accessible to engineers and everyone else involved in the design process, enabling CAE democratization? What if you could maximize the scope of a SPDM system by integrating the Business Process Modeling technology to automate models, coordinate user tasks, and track the activity of each single analyst? This paper shows how an actionable Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) workflow has been set up in a SPDM platform to create a business decision support system in the context of design optimization of an automotive composite leaf spring suspension. This innovative methodology makes it possible to connect and establish communication between different company departments involved in the product development process.