Abstract

The industry today is facing an increased demand of simulation over the entire product development cycle. More than ever, the pace of innovation in technology and business models is pushing companies to areas out of their experience. Increasing development time and cost must be mitigated by using simulation to check the product requirements as early as possible. As a matter of fact, the impact of simulation results on decision-making is significantly increasing throughout the whole product development starting from the first concept. But increasing simulation tasks lead to a point where it is necessary to also improve the overall process on a strategic level. How can the amount of simulation data be handled? How can it be kept up to date in concurrent engineering processes? Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) is the appropriate tool to seamlessly embed simulation in product development cycles in a closed loop from requirements to manufacturing. Schmitz Cargobull is a German manufacturer of semi-trailers, trailers and truck bodies and uses various Siemens tools throughout the product development. In this paper, the authors present how Schmitz Cargobull partnered with Siemens Industry Software to address the described challenge and used SPDM as a key strategy to significantly reduce product development time and cost. SPDM allowed to use simulation earlier and more frequently in the design to continuously check the fulfillment of requirements. Above faster execution, SPDM also leads to full traceability of data flow during development which allows more parallel working and increases the overall quality of simulation and how results are used for decision-making within the company. A strategic implementation of an SPLM process comprises different elements. The basic idea is to seamlessly capture all simulation data plus their relations to design revisions, requirements and depending decisions. Managed workflows are used to ensure the proper execution of engineering processes. We will address the different elements of the present SPDM implementation and connect them to how the contribute to the overall goal.