Business Contribution

Addressing Key Business Challenges

Manufacturers are pressed to refresh their product models much faster than before. Shortening time to market and reducing costs are simply not good enough anymore. They have to penetrate new markets with innovative new products that support and cultivate strong brand values. This calls for a high performance development process – with high throughput and high precision. A process that delivers the right products – designed right first time. Engineering departments are challenged to tune the functional performance characteristics of new designs to the values that support their brand identity. To meet these challenges, product development and engineering must take on a new mission.

Engineering innovative designs to deliver the expected brand values

Creating innovative and attractive products is not just about producing visually attractive designs. It is equally important to engineer the product’s performance to reflect the core brand values that create passion for the product.

Some manufacturers consider safety and reliability not just to be constraints but critical to their image. Other manufacturers hold subjective quality attributes such as comfort, sound quality and drivability as key product differentiators.

LMS enables a high-performance engineering process capable of refining critical functional performance attributes from the early design stage, long before committing to physical prototyping. Using virtual prototypes, engineering teams can quickly analyze a multitude of design options and make balanced trade-offs between primary and secondary concerns. This approach results in better insights and decisions at the early development stages and helps to accelerate the development of products that perform as expected first time right.

Constantly renewing and expanding the portfolio

Business Analysis reports show an impressive correlation between the profitability of manufacturers and the renewal of their product portfolio. New designs appeal to the market, and trend-setting models become market leaders. Manufacturers must expand their product portfolio and adapt a policy of mass customization - making many more variants on a common base platform to address niche markets and specific customer requirements. The development process needs to be dramatically shortened not just to save costs, but also to cope with the fast-growing flood of new models.

LMS supports leading manufacturing companies to accelerate their development processes by making performance attributes an integral part of the product development process from the very start. They use LMS virtual prototyping solutions to quickly assess the radiated noise of a new engine design, the vibration comfort of a complete vehicle, the fatigue resistance of an aircraft landing gear, or the structural integrity of an innovative aircraft design. They rely on LMS to analyze multiple design options much faster and much earlier in the process and to reduce their reliance on expensive and time-consuming physical prototype testing.

Reducing warranty costs and risks

Manufacturing companies have adopted an all-digital development environment to reduce development times and control costs. Great advances have been made in the ‘form-and-fit’ process stages - designers know what their product looks like and how components fit together. But getting a new car or aircraft design to perform as expected is still a major process bottleneck. Continuous cost squeezing, innovative designs, new and lighter materials, and ever-stricter environmental requirements pushes designers into new and uncertain territory. This often results in expensive product recalls and warranty costs that sometimes exceed R&D investments.

LMS offers the right solution mix to set targets, to detect design flaws in the early concept stages, to accurately assess and refine a product’s performance using validated virtual models and to efficiently validate the final design using advanced prototype-testing techniques. LMS customers not only measure their return on investment in terms of faster time-to-market and reduced development cost, but also in terms of improved product quality and reduced product recall costs.