Case Study
Astec Industries, Inc. is a global OEM with a portfolio of brands serving the asphalt, concrete, forestry, and mining industries. Astec manufactures more than 100 products including chippers and grinders; rock crushing and screening plants to hot mix asphalt (HMA) facilities, concrete plants, milling machines, asphalt pavers, and material transfer vehicles. With a global footprint Astec has design teams in many different countries and time zones. To make simulation available to all these engineers, Astec was looking for a flexible licensing solution that would be easy to use and affordable. With Ansys Cloud, they were able to break down licensing barriers for local engineering teams.
Challenges
With a central corporate team focused on simulation, Astec wanted to leverage their OneASTEC approach to extend access to simulation across the enterprise. They needed a solution to democratize license usage to help and empower local engineering teams to effectively use the Ansys portfolio.
Engineering Solution
Previously, Astec would rely on licensed users with powerful computers to run computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to design products used in the mining and road building industries (from “Rock to Road”). On-boarding new simulation users would require a dedicated license, training, and suitable hardware. But buying individual licenses and hardware for every engineer is expensive. Astec solved this problem by combining Ansys Elastic Units and Ansys Cloud to remove the computing hardware barrier. This new combination is providing access to Ansys software to more of Astec’s engineers so they can benefit from on-demand, cloudbased computing resources and training.
Benefits
- Local engineering teams can be upskilled faster with access to Ansys tools and support anywhere, at anytime
- Ansys Cloud frees up the simulation team’s time to focus on more complex requests that can’t be solved locally.
- The Astec simulation team can analyze usage and tool popularity, which helps with decision-making and budgeting.
- Ansys Cloud provides unlimited capacity and flexibility, offering a cost-effective way to respond to peak demand and high-priority jobs.