ANSYS BLOG
November 24, 2021
The Case of the Missing Simulation Data
Simulation-driven product development generates volumes of critical data. The inability to centralize, share, search, and re-use this data is negatively impacting your product innovation, development costs, and time-to-market.
Every day, your simulation-driven product development process is generating incredibly valuable insights about your product designs. Simulation data predicts performance at both the component and system levels, across all physics. It guides material selection. It increases your confidence that your brand will not be adversely affected by recalls and warranty claims. It supports higher levels of customer satisfaction. It drives product innovation.
Simulation data feeds all your most critical decisions, allowing you to make fact-based choices and trade-offs as you launch products into the market. But where exactly is it?
In most organizations, simulation data is hard to find. Some of it might be on a jump drive or in a desk drawer. Other data might be stored on the laptop of an employee who’s out on vacation. Maybe it’s stuck in an email inbox or on a public file-sharing website, lost in that gray space between engineering functions.
Unless you’ve made a formal, conscious effort to centralize and share your simulation data, it’s all over the place. Your employees won’t tell you this, but they’re spending hours of their time every day trying to locate it. And, even when they find the simulation data files they’re looking for, the confusion continues. There may be multiple versions, with different owners and varying file names. No one is sure which file is the right one.
It’s a lot to sort out. And all this sorting out contributes to the approximately a third of the time your engineers spend every day on nonproductive work.
Source: Tech-Clarity
As your employees waste hours searching for simulation data files — or, even worse, re-running simulations to replace the missing data ― your development costs are increasing. Your time-to-market is growing. You’re missing key milestones and deadlines. And that product innovation you were so proud of three months ago? It could take another three months to get it out the door, giving competitors time to launch a similar product.
Solve the Mystery with Ansys Minerva
For 50 years, Ansys has been focused on maximizing the strategic value of engineering simulation — and effective simulation data management is a key part of that value. That’s why Ansys has developed Minerva, an enterprise-level simulation process and data management (SPDM) solution that’s designed specifically to eliminate daily challenges like missing data.
By creating a single, searchable, centralized repository for all your simulation data, Ansys Minerva maximizes speed, efficiency, cost effectiveness, and engineering productivity throughout the product development cycle. It promotes cross-functional, real-time transparency, traceability and accountability for all simulation data. Minerva supports keyword searches at the metadata level, automatic version control, and user-specific dashboards that enable easy file access. Never again will your employees have to search through drawers or sort through multiple file versions, wasting precious time on non-value-added work. Not only does Minerva increase the efficiency of simulation data management, it significantly improves the speed and accuracy of the overall development process. Centralized, sharable, searchable data ― that can be accessed by every stakeholder in real time — translates to fast, automated project handoffs, optimized workflows, and greater collaboration across siloes. It becomes exponentially easier for the interdisciplinary engineering team to weigh design trade-offs, make fact-based decisions, and explore design innovations that represent a significant competitive edge.
In addition, Minerva makes it easy and seamless to use your existing simulation data as an input for new product studies. Instead of having your employees “re-invent the wheel” with each product design iteration, you can begin with a foundation of existing engineering knowledge and build from there.
By creating a digital thread that spans the end-to-end development process, Ansys Minerva links your entire team on a single technology platform, no matter how functionally and geographically separated individual team members are. Minerva also provides firewalls, passwords, and other security measures to protect your organization’s most sensitive intellectual property (IP) ― which is likely at risk today, if it’s stored in a drawer or on an employee’s personal laptop.
Stop Searching and Start Innovating
Your product development team is too talented, and too valuable, to invest hours every day solving the puzzle of data management. And, given today’s engineering talent shortage, you need to maximize the strategic contributions of every team member.
Minerva is a purpose-built solution created to address the challenge of centralizing, sharing, searching, and re-using your simulation data, to maximize your return on investment and amplify your human resources. Developed by the engineering simulation experts at Ansys, Minerva is an intuitive SPDM solution that’s customized to the way product development teams work together every day.
By leveraging Minerva, you can immediately begin to increase your team’s productivity and outputs, reduce manual errors and rework, and support a higher level of design freedom and product innovation. You can speed your products’ path through the development cycle and reduce your costs, while remaining confident that all the analytic boxes have been checked and your most critical IP is secured. You can gain a competitive edge by getting to market first with your game-changing new ideas. It’s time to stop wasting hours searching for missing data and start earning a greater return on all your information and human assets via optimized simulation data management.
Begin by requesting a free demo of Ansys Minerva today.