CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
7 May 2008
Implementation Investments
AUDI AG Enters Production in Largest Global Installation of MSC.Software's SimManager
MSC.Software announced that the automotive manufacturer AUDI AG has further extended their existing simulation management environment, going into full-scale production with MSC.Software's SimManager Enterprise offering. The system of Audi represents the largest global installation of SimManager Enterprise to date, helping multiple engineering groups within Audi as well as their supplier community to accelerate the vehicle development process of Audi and improve their insight into system level functional performance.
The Audi SimManager system highlights the scalability of SimManager to support the simulation requirements of global engineering enterprises. SimManager Enterprise manages currently more than 180,000 simulations, with up to 850 new simulations created per day and enables collaboration amongst 400 internal and external users on all new vehicle multi-discipline programs, for Crash, Pedestrian Safety, Occupant Safety, Head Impact and NVH engineering disciplines. The system provides secure, managed access to currently over 20 million simulation content objects and provides an audit trail for each one that documents how they were created. Manually intensive tasks such as model assembly, post-processing and report generation are automated in SimManager, allowing Audi to run more simulations per vehicle and effectively use CAE to improve vehicle performance and innovate. To validate the production readiness of SimManager, the Audi system was exhaustively tested against the unique performance and scalability demands of simulation.
"We have adopted MSC.Software's enterprise solutions including SimManager because the competitive advantage of simulation process management is clear," said Dr. Michael Holzner of Audi. "With SimManager, we manage and automate our simulation processes and methods, allowing us to integrate functional performance information earlier on in the design process. The results show that we increase the through put of simulations by 35% with the same amount of people."
SimManager Enterprise allows automotive and other manufacturing organizations to harness and fully exploit both the large quantities of simulation content for their inherent knowledge. This is crucial in high value product development. SimManager Enterprise is designed to complement existing PDM and PLM systems, saving time and cost with easy integration of simulation content within the existing IT infrastructure. Additionally, SimManager goes beyond traditional data management approaches in additionally enabling process-based automation of the required simulation tasks.
An effectively managed simulation environment supports the engineering in two ways. Firstly the standardization, automation and robust execution of simulation processes using repeatable and reliable simulation processes effectively enables more simulation throughput with guaranteed best-practice quality. Secondly, content management capabilities enable the analyst to easily find, re-use and share simulation information within collaborating workgroups as well as across remote departments, production sites or the extended supply chain. This is evident in the new Audi deployment with the production scale SimManager environment.
"Global manufacturing organizations face significant challenges in effectively managing their simulation environment, and a highly functional simulation capability alone is no longer sufficient in order to extract maximum production and commercial benefit from their technology investments," said Amir Mobayen, Executive Vice President for Worldwide Sales and Services, MSC.Software "We are proud of our strategic working relationship with Audi that has led to this simulation industry breakthrough. SimManager is the only proven enterprise scalable solution for managing simulation content."
Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.
Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.
CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.