SMBs need NX Performance Predictor to quickly get to market.
Siemens has sponsored this post.
Engineers in startups and small to medium business (SMBs) wear a lot of hats. This is mostly due to the common product development challenges these new and/or small organizations face:
- People challenge: the company doesn’t have enough individuals to fill in all the roles.
- Technology challenge: the company doesn’t have access to every tool to perform optimally.
- Process challenge: the company relies on undefined workflows with various data silos.
As the ‘technological brains’ behind the operations, engineers are often tapped to find solutions to these issues. This is problematic, as the main objective of engineers and simulation experts is to get products working and onto market faster.
Julien Simon, product manager of NX Performance Predictor, explains how these common challenges can be addressed using simulation-driven design. In this article, he highlights the top three benefits of computer-aided engineering (CAE) — via NX Performance Predictor — for SMBs and startups.
1. Improved innovation, product quality and performance
The main objective of simulation-driven design is to predict the performance of any given model within the real world. This has multiple benefits including reducing errors in the final design, verifying or testing assumptions and finding flaws early — when they are easier to fix.
Julien Simon uses the example of a design review meeting between marketing and engineering teams. As people see the geometry in the meeting, they may say “it’s a good idea, but they will ask questions. Now you can put your design in a virtual world to assess performance and quality while within the meeting in the real-world. So, you can already give some KPIs in the early phase.”
These real-time assessments around a boardroom not only improve the quality of a design, but they also promote a culture of innovation. If a marketer thinks a product might sell better if it has an extra curve to its profile, then the engineer can test how that curvature affects aerodynamics or structural integrity right before the marketer’s eyes. The engineer doesn’t have to return back to their desk, spend a few days simulating, and then fall behind half-a-dozen other geometry suggestions.
“If you start to discuss the design from the beginning with a lot of people in the company, you can discuss more ideas,” says Julien Simon. “You can discuss it on the 3D design and test it out — live. There are lots of things you can improve when you have a real product in front of you, the usability, the weight, and you can make trade-offs based on what you see. By embracing more proposals of ideas, it allows you to be more innovative and test more solutions.”
2. Improved product costs and revenue
Simulation-led design offers many methods to save on costs while boosting revenue. Consider the previous examples. As engineers improve the quality of the product — by testing out more innovative ideas from various sources — they are likely to improve a product’s performance in the market. The engineers also improve communications with common stakeholders, simplifying workflows and improving productivity because, as Julien Simon says, “you test the idea as soon as it comes.”
It isn’t just engineers and coworkers that benefit from the ability of simulation-driven design to test customizations; customers benefit, too. “There is lots of customization in products today,” says Julien Simon. “You can purchase a customized bike online and use the simulations from these tools to show the customer if the size of their frame is okay or not. This helps the customization process as it provides guidance.” And with product customizations comes higher sales, market value and customer satisfaction.
From a simulation-driven design perspective, a product’s performance is based on its ability to perform its given task while remaining durable throughout its lifecycle. Thus, engineers can use CAE to improve a design by increasing a products durability or reducing its loads. “It’s a trade-off of weight, cost and durability,” confirms Julien Simon. “That’s why simulation driven design is so important. It’s easier to do this at the start than in the end of the design process as it will cost less to implement.”
Julien Simon also suggests that “70% of costs can be saved using simulation-driven design.” He cites that tools that encourage simulation-driven design, like NX Performance Predictor, streamline development and make better products; this leads to higher sales and lower costs.
He adds that these tools also reduce the cost to train CAE users. What once took weeks of theoretical background and training can now be done in a day. Siemens even offers digital learning tools to help train new users to use CAE.
3. Improved development workflows and time to market
Speaking of reducing the training to get users to use CAE, this also leads to another big benefit: improving development workflows. There are only so many simulation experts and, in most cases, they are working at capacity. Therefore, if simulation is to help further improve products it must be usable by more individuals.
Julien Simon states there are two ways these improvements can come about. First, simulation-led design tools, like NX Performance Predictor, are designed to work within tools designers are comfortable with. As a result, it can, “demystify the simulation process so more users can use it,” he says. “When you want to broaden simulation to more people, you need to assess the cost of training. For that we see simulation-driven design solutions can be learned in a couple of days.”
The other strategy is to use AI and algorithmic assisting tools like topology optimization. As the AI learns about optimal designs for the industry, it can help guide newer engineers to produce better designs. Meanwhile, topology optimization tools can take input requirements, such as stress, and provide a near-optimal shape based on its given algorithms.
In both cases the output from the tool may not be the final design, but it helps more users get to that near-optimal geometry faster. This way the simulation experts can focus on more pressing models such as final design optimizations, validations and verifications. Additionally, it enables teams to work more concurrently so that a design that might take a week to produce could instead take days.
Why NX Performance Predictor?
Julien Simon notes the importance of high-end simulation to help organizations finalize, verify and validate designs. But for SMBs and startups its important to start with a tool that is scalable, like NX Performance Predictor. This is because it enables engineers to:
- Get prototypes and designs ready as fast as possible.
- Find failures early so that worktime and budgets can be invested optimally.
- Ensure data is collected, used, reused and scaled as the company grows.
He adds that because the tool is integrated into Siemens cloud-based platform solutions it also enables organizations to scale their digital solutions as they need them. “Starting in NX Performance Predictor, you can reuse what you did there, access the licensing system in the cloud to access another tool, and maintain digital continuity. For instance, you can dig deeper into the design in the Simcenter Portfolio as the start-up grows into a larger company.”
To learn more about NX Performance Predictor and how it can scale with a growing organization, visit Siemens.
