Engineering Intent Must Drive Product Development

By Dan Meyer, Comet Solutions

Engineering leaders prefer to learn about problematic design concepts when the cost to change designs is low. They understand that accelerating the design-break-fix cycle with CAE tools is key to meeting their market and business requirements. But this traditional product-development process is driven by the CAD model, and engineering change orders (ECOs) often result in high costs and pain points, even as performance insights are gained downstream.

  Why do companies continue to work in a manner that carries such a high risk of launch delays and disgruntled customers? To produce innovative products in a timely manner, the product development process must be driven by engineering intent, not CAD.

  If companies followed a process where engineering requirements drive even the earliest concept studies, they would avoid having products added to a long list of recalls. Early insight into how a design will perform helps reduce these costly mistakes.

  And while this change may sound complicated, it’s not.  Companies that embrace such processes are using the same people and tools — it’s when and how team members are used that radically improves the way products are being designed and tested.

  There is no doubt designers will and should do more CAE in design. CAE should really be about solving design problems based on performance engineering insight. Doing simulations is where we really want to be when we design, but the simulation process using CAE tools has become very complex.

  Giving complex CAE tools to designers is not the solution. In fact, this “solution” actually hampers the design process by adding layers of complexity and frustration. How can we expect a designer to be an expert with CAE/FEA tools and in interpreting results? Designers are trained to model in CAD, not to understand the complexities of engineering trade-offs.

  So how do you implement a workflow where engineering requirements drive the product development process if not by putting CAE tools into the hands of designers? Submit easy-to-use templates so designers can evaluate product performance.

  By using the knowledge, process, and models captured in templates, designers don’t need to be experts in new CAE tools. It’s quite simple — the expertise of analysts is captured upfront to govern the flow of work downstream. It means designers as well as other specialists can tap powerful underlying CAE tools to evaluate product performance at every stage in the process. Because data entry and the remodeling process are automated,  design teams can simulate more concepts while removing bottlenecks caused by busy analysts.

  These templates enable designers to complete more simulations on their own, reuse analyst expertise throughout the process, and access immediate results so informed decisions are made earlier. After running a concept through the template process, the engineering performance results are displayed in real time. This enables designers and managers to avoid doomed design concepts early.

  These reusable templates lead to better decisions, strategic product evaluation, and automation of what were once time-consuming processes. By capturing engineering intent in templates, you can push the role of the detailed CAD model further down the product development process where it rightfully belongs.

  Non-CAE experts are running complex, multiphysics simulations through Comet templates with no more than a day’s training. Companies worldwide are using Comet’s reusable and tool-neutral templates to boost productivity and improve innovation. They are solving pain through reusability,  automation, and empowering more team members.   They have discovered how to drive product development using engineering intent captured in templates.

Dan Meyer is president of Comet Solutions. You can send an e-mail about this commentary to [email protected].