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Sustainable Mobility: Automotive Industry Challenges, Opportunities and the Role of PLM
This report seeks to frame the issues, challenges and opportunities presented by the global automotive industry’s drive toward sustainable mobility. Through in-depth research and interviews with executives, policy makers and thought leaders at automotive OEMs and suppliers, government agencies, and nongovernmental bodies influencing policy and practice, we sought to:
- Identify the challenges these initiatives pose for the auto industry and its stakeholders today
- Explore the range of technologies, entrenched and emerging alike, now being evaluated and adopted to help meet these challenges
- Explore in particular the value of product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions in meeting these challenges, today and going forward
The perspectives in this report are intended to benefit – and foster mutual understanding among – corporate executives, compliance officers, product development executives, program managers, PLM system leads, discipline leads, engineers, designers and other stakeholders in the automotive industry’s present and future. We believe informed, coordinated engagement by all these is crucial to meet the triple-bottom-line challenge – people/planet/profit – posed by sustainability, and to emerge from today’s industry turmoil strengthened and poised to lead.
Strengthening Simulation’s Business Impact:
- New Strategies in Aerospace & Defense
- New Strategies in Aircraft Engines
- New Strategies in Automotive
- Optimizing Product Development Through Faster Analysis Workflows
Product development organizations throughout manufacturing industry still suffer program-gating constraints on getting the value they need from digital simulation tools and the work processes that rely on them. What are they doing about it? To find out, we interviewed discipline leads and methods experts at major OEMs, suppliers and subcontractors around the world. Our investigation focused on business drivers for sustaining or increasing simulation investments, current state of industry practice, constraints on maximizing simulation’s value, and new strategies for overcoming these constraints. This series of white papers offers first-hand advice and lessons of experience for planning new and ongoing investments in simulation technology, and for managing these tools to exploit your organization's simulation competencies to the fullest.
3D Engineering: How 3D Direct Modeling Empowers Conceptual Engineering and Enables Simulation-Driven Product Development
Engineers have long envisioned 3D as a medium for capturing and exploring engineering concepts, performing what-if analysis, collaborating in teams, and communicating and “selling” their ideas to colleagues and customers. Missing has been consensus on what’s needed to make a 3D engineering tool accessible and appealing to all stakeholders in the product development process — from systems architects, engineers, analysts, industrial designers and detail designers, to program managers and corporate executives. That consensus may now be taking shape around the emerging technology of 3D direct modeling. We studied a half-dozen early adopters of software from SpaceClaim Corporation across a spectrum of industries — avionics systems, custom architectural metals, defense vehicles, medical devices, automotive components, and industrial design. We sought to understand why they adopted this technology, what sets it apart from previous software they’ve used, and how it’s benefiting them in their individual professional roles as well as their organizations. This report documents our findings.
General Dynamics Land Systems Achieves Early Simulation
in a Unified Performance-Engineering Workspace Based on Abstract Modeling
How to bring simulation earlier in the product design process has been discussed for years but few have been able to overcome the technical and work-process barriers to doing so. This white paper details how General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) launched a process where automation through templates with abstract modeling technology creates a seamless modeling/simulation process. By eliminating manual steps and allowing engineering and analysis processes to be built around an abstract model, this new process condenses project timelines – in a project piloting the new technology, extracting data from a CAD model and using it to populate an analysis database was slashed from an all-day job to just two hours. Even more, the new process makes it feasible to begin analysis early in design, while alternative geometries and product configurations are still being evaluated.
Enabling Digital Simulation and Analysis
Based on our in-depth investigations of digital simulation best practices at aerospace/defense, aircraft engine, automotive powertrain, consumer electronics, medical device and off-highway equipment manufacturers, this report details eight functional enablers that are key to helping these industries achieve their goal of deploying digital simulation pervasively through the product lifecycle: Scalability and consistency • Intelligent model generation • Industrial-strength productivity • Multi-physics, multi-disciplinary • Open integration • Visualization and collaboration • Reusable processes and knowledge • Simulation process management.
Mitigating Risk in AEC Project Execution:
Perspectives from Principals, Counsel and Insurers
The capital asset industry’s declining productivity over the past half-century stands in marked contrast to the many fields where work process improvements enabled by automation technology have yielded strong gains. This white paper reveals how 11 industry leaders – A/E firm principals, legal professionals and insurers – believe the industry went off the rails, and what they see as the best chances for setting things right. A root problem, the paper found, is fear of liability and aversion to risk exposure – and many industry-standard practices that, paradoxically, were originally meant to minimize A/E firms’ exposure to risk by compartmentalizing responsibility. Now, growing numbers are becoming convinced that more and deeper engagement in projects by A/E firms – in effect, greater exposure to liability – can in fact reduce the likelihood and severity of problems. Thus, leading practices are seeking new ways to stay better informed about and more deeply involved in all aspects of project execution and its supporting business processes, including actions that are the direct responsibility of other stakeholders in a project. This white paper explores to what extent thought leaders see the answer in, on the one hand, BIM (building information modeling) and data-centric building processes, and on the other hand in firm-wide standardization of business practices and project execution processes, and inculcation of top-flight project management skills. The paper captures current thinking on whether, and how, these functions can be aided by digital technologies in ways that parallel how BIM and 3D modeling support the building definition process.
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