.

Customizing MSC software for in-house codes enabled engineers at GKN Westland to add site-specific loads to this model of the EH101 helicopter

But considering how difficult it can be just to achieve incremental improvements in the product-development process, where should engineers look to identify sources of exponential improvements? As engineers re-evaluate—or re-engineer—product-development processes to maximize their flexibility in taking advantage of new technology and automated work processes, some are reaching the conclusion that product development must also take into account the revolutionary changes in business since the early 1980s. These include rapidly changing consumer expectations and the need to cut costs in response to global competition—not to mention the rise of business partnerships in which manufacturers team with suppliers, subcontractors, outsourcing service providers, and sometimes even competitors to develop a new product.

Obviously, making the engineering process more responsive to changes in the business world is a tall order. But Tom Curry, president and chief executive officer of the MacNeal-Schwendler Corp. (MSC) in Los Angeles, knows it can be done. Over years of working closely with customers in many industries, his company has created simulation tools that give engineers the power and flexibility to address customer expectations and achieve critical business goals.

For example, automotive engineers use simulation tools such as MSC/NASTRAN and MSC/NVH_Manager not only to identify the sources of noise in prototypes but also to optimize acoustic performance in a vehicle still in the design phase. The difference between the two processes, obviously, is that the former is a standard activity for virtually all automakers that doesn't necessarily add value to the product from the customer's point of view. The latter, on the other hand, is a customer-driven engineering practice, one that can add substantial value to a product and add quantitatively to the manufacturer's bottom line.

"In the past, CAE software developers largely left it to their customers to devise ways of translating customer demands or a company's business goals into engineering terms," Curry said. "But our customers' business realities are changing faster than ever before, and we've re-engineered our business to help them respond to their customers and the competitive environment with more flexibility and less cost."

Since his appointment as MSC's president and CEO last year, Curry has reorganized the company into industry-specific business units for aerospace, automotive, and growth industries. The goals of the reorganization and the thinking behind it are impressive. On the one hand, the new business units will make it even easier for MSC to partner with its customers; on the other, the re-engineered organization will enable MSC engineers to gain a better understanding of how businesses in a single industry are responding to common competitive threats and business challenges in their industry. This, in turn, will help MSC identify the commonalities that engineers in one industry face so that entire processes—such as automotive noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) testing—can be automated.

Once such processes have been automated, Curry is betting that engineers will refocus their efforts on re- engineering those processes to help their companies achieve a unique or distinctive advantage over the competition, or to leverage their companies' unique expertise, market strategy, or core competencies. For example, with industry- and process-specific tools like the newly released MSC/NVH_Manager, engineers can address consumer demands for cars that are more fun to drive, with some delivering a fun—but stiffer—ride preferred in many European markets and others perfecting the velvety ride favored by Americans.

By establishing a rigorous framework in which engineering and business considerations can be addressed early in the design cycle, Curry argues, manufacturers can indeed achieve exponential additions of value to the product-development process. After all, it's one thing to design and build a car cheaply; it's quite another to deliver automobiles that are so finely tuned to market and business conditions that they practically drive themselves off the lot—and keep dealers' (and manufacturers') inventories low.

One advantage of MSC's strategy is that the new tools already released or now in the pipeline give engineers the flexibility to change engineering processes to the extent deemed necessary given a manufacturer's core engineering competencies and its market position. They don't impose a particular process or methodology on users, however.

"What's significant about our strategy is that it's process-oriented, rather than only feature-oriented," said Tom Tecco, vice president of MSC's Automotive Group. "Our customers don't have a 'finite-element department,' but they do have groups responsible for calculating a vehicle's NVH attribute, crash attribute, dynamics, and durability—all key product differentiators. We're aligning our software with these processes so that companies can focus on improving their products and processes overall."

The Automotive Group's process-focused tools, which include MSC/NVH_Manager and MSC/Fatigue, are more than just integrated design, preprocessing, analysis, and postprocessing systems. "MSC/NVH_Manager, for example, is a complete simulation interface for analyzing NVH that presents users with a complete vehicle with a body, powertrain, and suspension that's already set up for what-if analyses," Tecco explained. "Users don't have to go through the intermediate step of creating an MSC/NASTRAN data deck."

In creating such interfaces, software developers at MSC have taken care to present models and other information in the user's language. "Automotive engineers don't necessarily think in terms of meshes or element distortions," Tecco said. "But they do think in terms of shock absorbers, coil springs, and the like. Accordingly, we're providing templates for building models—subassemblies, assemblies, and final system models—on the basis of parts and points in space."

By helping to automate the process of building a suspension model, for example, MSC/NVH_Manager lets engineers focus on changing system parameters and analyzing the resulting design iterations. "As a result, engineers can spend their time evaluating new suspension-system design concepts and refining existing ones to gain a competitive advantage," Tecco said.

The benefits of this approach, he said, are the software's ability to "reduce product-development cycles by increasing engineers' efficiency and to provide a consistent methodology for building a model—one that can be implemented throughout a whole company or vehicle platform so that when engineers compare different models, they can be sure there is consistency in the way the models were built. In this way, MSC/NVH_Manager serves as a quality-control tool."

Although it's easy to see how engineers could use the software to shrink design-through-manufacturing cycles and increase efficiencies, its ability to help engineers craft distinctive product-development cycles may not be so obvious. A tool like MSC/NVH_Manager can generate an astonishing amount of data. However, having an enormous amount of information at one's fingertips doesn't translate into a commensurate amount of knowledge about the underlying phenomena. What distinguishes a successful manufacturer from the also-rans often comes down to how its engineers use such data; given its emphasis on partnering, MSC is ready to work with customers to ensure that the integration of its software with home-grown tools leverages existing analysis strengths or helps develop new ones.

For instance, some automakers have integrated MSC's simulation technology with in-house postprocessing tools that distinguish noise levels, for example, at the driver's or passenger's left ear from those at the right. In some cases, engineers have found significantly different noise levels between the two. Once such a phenomenon has been uncovered, engineers can address the problem in a way that results in a product that stands out from the pack—an essential ingredient to success in the world's increasingly crowded auto market.

The strategy of MSC's Automotive Group seems right on target given today's business realities in that industry, where automakers increasingly focus on integrating subsystems manufactured by partners into total systems that function superbly and increase a platform's market share and profitability. At the Aerospace Business Unit, however, simulation technology is being developed for a different business reality. Because of a host of factors including trade barriers, cost considerations, and close government supervision of defense industries, aerospace manufacturers need to design anywhere and build everywhere. For these companies, crafting a product-development process that draws on unique expertise and core competencies—while it integrates the engineering teams, processes, and tools assembled to develop a specific product—is essential to distinguishing themselves from the competition.

As a result, "our focus is on helping customers optimize their design-to-certification process," said Ken Blakely, vice president and general manager of MSC's Aerospace Business Unit. One of the most critical goals for airframe manufacturers is to streamline the definition of the operating environment as well as the detailed design and verification process, and MSC is developing tools to do just that.

The company has already released MSC/SuperModel, a comprehensive tool for managing the modeling and structural analysis of airframes, launch vehicles, satellites, and aircraft engines. A new flight-load and aeroelasticity system is in the works, and is expected for release in mid-1998.

One reason why operating-environment definition and detailed design and verification aren't as efficient as they could be is that aerospace manufacturers typically use automated structural analysis tools and processes that aren't necessarily integrated. Accordingly, MSC/SuperModel is intended to integrate these specialized codes with MSC/NASTRAN and MSC/PATRAN. It also provides a single infrastructure with which engineers from various disciplines can perform each function in the process: component and assembly modeling, trade-study organization and management, loads idealization and management, and results manipulation and management. MSC/SuperModel can function as a tool for managing the overall analysis process—including a company's proprietary processes—from design through certification.

One way MSC/SuperModel can help aerospace manufacturers cut time to market is by providing a global view of an airframe or an engine—initially in the form of a coarse model—early in the design process. "By starting with a coarse system model with all of its constituent parts, engineers can focus on developing the complete system, not just the parts," Blakely said. "Moreover, teams of engineers around the world can perform modeling and postprocessing in parallel."

As work proceeds, coarse component designs are refined within the context of the overall model, or "supermodel," which includes loads, boundary conditions, and other information needed to analyze a part or subsystem within the complete assembly. Moreover, as component designs are refined, the coarse models of substructures—the "submodels"—can be replaced with more refined ones. Likewise, boundary conditions, loads (external, internal, reaction, and interface), and other data can be defined or refined as analysis and test data are generated.

In addition to providing impressive modeling, analysis, postprocessing, and integration features, MSC/SuperModel also functions as a structural-analysis file-management system. It has a user-definable file hierarchy that links associated files to organize data by project and maintain file inheritance. The software allows common files to be shared between models and provides access to a user-specific archive facility. It also offers read/write security access and file locking as well as file-state and authorization checks. Enabling manufacturers to manage data on such a scale, many engineers agree, is essential to ensure that proprietary data remain proprietary—a requirement in a business environment where even competitors sometimes cooperate to develop a product.

While at first glance MSC's Growth Industries Business Unit seems like a hodgepodge—it caters to manufacturers in the electronic-packaging, consumer-products, shipbuilding, and oil-services sectors—it's actually well positioned to serve their CAE needs. "Instead of creating one large, complex product with a long life, as is the case in the automotive and aerospace industries, many of these businesses manufacture products with high volumes and short lives," said Rick Murphy, the unit's vice president and general manager. "Time to market is everything for these businesses. They might come out with many new products a year, so their concern isn't necessarily system-level analysis but, rather, piece-part or subassembly analysis."

MSC is following a two-pronged approach in meeting these customers' needs. "Engineers in growth industries typically need total solutions—not only in the sense of having integrated pre- and postprocessors but also several types of built-in solvers," Murphy said. "In the case of an air bag, for example, engineers typically use MSC/DYTRAN to analyze the air bag and MSC/ NASTRAN for the surrounding enclosure."

Engineers in growth industries often need application-specific tools as well, Murphy said, because their products are developed in a way that can differ significantly from methods used in the automotive and aerospace sectors. "In automotive and aerospace, you find many more specialist engineers," he added. "But in many growth industries, 'all-around' engineers are often the norm. They perform a wide range of tasks throughout the year, so they typically don't gain enough familiarity with general-purpose simulation technology to automate particular applications, such as drop testing."

In delivering total solutions and application-specific tools, software developers at MSC will emphasize providing a common user interface and a common analysis model. "This approach will not only serve generalist engineers well but also increase the efficiency of the overall product-development process," Murphy said. "A common interface will reduce the time required to build an analysis model, while a common model will eliminate the need to produce a different model for different applications, such as structural analysis and nonlinear analysis."

Many companies in fast-growing industries don't have the time or the resources to focus on developing customized tools and processes, but in the case of tools developed by MSC's Growth Industries Business Unit, a little consulting will come for free with each product. "As the largest provider of simulation technology, we work with a broad cross section of growth industries, and we're seeing that many of them face common engineering problems," Murphy said.

"Drop testing is a good example. Manufacturers of bladed razors and manufacturers of car phones probably wouldn't sit down to identify commonalities in their drop-testing processes, but we develop that expertise through our extensive partnerships with customers. We have technology in place at MSC that will enable us to customize our general-purpose drop-testing tool if there's a demand. For example, in a relatively short time we could come up with application-specific drop-testing software for products with electronics, like car phones, and for products like bladed razors that don't have electronics inside.

"It's possible that other companies can develop such focused tools," he added. "By partnering so closely with our customers, we're ensuring that if a CAE need arises, we'll be the first to see it—and we'll be the first to deliver a focused product to market."

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