Unlocking Value for Design Engineering

We’ve heard a lot about cost so far. That’s not really the language we speak in design. Although we’re responsible for cost, we’re very rarely accountable for it. That’s what we’re going to explore today, and how aPriori can really unlock a lot of value for design engineering. Then there’s a term I think of as quantified DFX: quantifying design for excellence, design for manufacturability, design for cost, design for supply chain, all of those things that can be X, quantifying that information and using it to make data-driven decisions during design.

So, design engineering today. One of the challenges that is quite obvious, and we speak to customers about this all the time, is that products are more complex than ever before. They’re not just mechanical products anymore. They’re electromechanical, there’s software that goes into them, there’s connectivity, and there’s the move to electrification. There’s a skills gap there. Requirements can also shift mid-design because of all of those things. So it’s a lot more involved.

Competition is greater. We get new competition from the Far East, from China, and the speed and quality coming out of those regions is a lot closer to where we’ve traditionally competed. They’ve also got the lower-cost advantage. So every decision under margin is under pressure.

Demographics are changing as well. As Fielder mentioned, there’s the brain drain. People are getting older. They’re retiring. That expertise we had in our organization is walking out. There are also a lot of unfilled roles and that skills gap. I’ve spoken about the skills gap throughout my 20 years in engineering software, and it’s always been there. It’s always been a concern. The average worker age is climbing too, so that’s only going to get more challenging.

But the biggest problem we speak about in design, and it always has been, is time. It might sound really obvious that time is a challenge, but when I’ve spoken to customers about why time is so important, the answer is different for different people. What you do with that time is very dependent on what industry you’re in and what kind of market you’re in.

If you’re manufacturing a product that goes to market, being first to market is a real advantage. Those that do get to market first tend to get more market share. They can often demand a premium price. You might not be in that kind of product or industry. You might be delivering special-purpose machinery for a customer. In that case, you might have late penalties if you deliver late. Or in aerospace, if you’re delivering, you might have a date that you need to deliver by. You might need to rush shipping or expedite shipping to get there on time to avoid that, all of which is going to increase your costs.

Doing things more quickly and efficiently and launching sooner usually leads to higher profit margins too. And the longer the project goes on, the greater the risk of that project being canceled, and that capital is tied up for longer. So there you have it. You might think that time is more important than cost, but time really is money, and it all comes back to cost.

So why is time such a challenge? There are feedback loops. You’ve got to find the information. There’s a lot that goes into design. Products are getting more complex. There’s a lot of information that you don’t have to hand. There are reviews that you go through, and often these feedback loops are very slow. Just for a design review, you’ve got to get everybody in a room. You’ve got to find time on the calendar. You’ve got to prepare for that. There are lots of activities that are not adding value to the design process.

Then there’s rework. If something needs to change after a design review, you’ve got to go back. There are issues that are flagged maybe after tooling or quotes have already begun. You’ve got to go back and redo it. Inevitably, something is still going to slip through after a design review because products are more complex, so we’ve got to go back and address it.

Then next up, as Fielder mentioned, our friend Microsoft Excel. Incredibly powerful and versatile. Engineers love it as well, but it’s incredibly limiting. They’re manual processes at the end of the day. There’s not that much opportunity for automation with it. Essentially, complexity just outpaces capacity.

I think of all of these things as losing design momentum. When you’re in CAD, you’re designing something, your ideas are flowing, and you’re able to get lots of work done. But when you reach a point where you need to check something, whether it’s simulation or cost, or you’re looking for information about materials, you lose that design momentum. That’s really what slows you down.

When we’re designing, if we have to stop and hunt for that information, book a review meeting, or ask a supplier for a quote, we’re really stuck until we’ve got that answer. Maintaining that design momentum is key. Having the intelligence at the point of design decision-making is really what we’re after.

There are lots of questions that come up. What material should I be using? What’s the best manufacturing process? How do I make it lighter, for instance? How do I reduce the environmental impact? Depending on the market, that might be important. How do I keep the cost down? Maybe it’s also about cycle time. How do I make it more efficient to manufacture?

Let’s take a look at an example question. In this example, we’ve got a plastic part we’ve designed, and there’s something that might get flagged in a review meeting, by my CAD software, or by another piece of software that says, “This is potentially going to cause a problem for our tooling.” We’ve got a bit of an overhang there. It’s not going to be straightforward to make. That could be flagged as something really severe. We don’t really know what the impact of that is. So it’s flagged as an issue, or we can address it.

We could either make a more complex tool, or we could put a hole in the front, redesign it slightly, and we’ve got a new design. Maybe it’s not as aesthetic as the previous version, but we’ve got options around it. How do we decide which one is best? We’ve identified the undercuts. What’s the impact on cycle time and tooling cost? We don’t know from a design review meeting. We need to analyze it and find that out.

Then we’ve got another question: What do we want to do about it? Do we want to compromise the performance or the aesthetics? What is the trade-off? We really need that cost aspect or the cycle-time aspect to have a more rounded decision and make that decision correctly.

Then another example. We’ve got this actuator housing. Maybe it’s in a lower-temperature environment. We’ve got a choice of material selection. We’ve got the option of aluminum, but because of the environment it’s in, we probably need to powder coat it or anodize it, something like that, so it can stand up to the environment. Or we could use zinc. Zinc may be more expensive. We don’t need the coating because it can stand up to that environment. It’s stronger, heavier, and more dense.

So how do we make the decision between the two? We can’t intuitively say that aluminum with powder coating or anodizing is going to be a similar cost to zinc. So we need to do a bit more work and get the answers from a simulation to make that trade-off decision.

There’s a lot more to consider than just cost as well. Design for X is about a whole range of different things. These are the considerations that design engineers are looking at. Design for assembly, design for weight, design for sustainability, design for supply chain, quality, manufacture. There’s a whole host of things. Cost is a really nice way to quantify that decision as a yardstick.

So what would more time mean to you? This is different for a lot of customers as well. I’ve heard some customers say it means they can spend longer developing concepts and ultimately lead to better designs. For others, it’s about getting to market earlier and getting that extra market share. It means they’ve got more resources for new product introduction, so you can expand margin and not just revise existing products with issues. It really does depend on where you’re at and what that extra time means to you.

That’s where aP Design comes in. Analyzing the 3D CAD means it’s consistent feedback. We’ve heard that before. With our physics-based analysis, it’s going to be the same for the same model. You get the same consistent feedback. And it takes minutes at most. So you’re not losing that design momentum. You can answer a lot of the questions very quickly.

You get quantified results for part and assembly cost, tooling cost, how many setups are needed, cycle time, CO2, and much more. Those quantified results mean we can make very consistent, considered decisions. So quantified DFX, that’s what we offer with aPriori. It’s cost, it’s CO2, it’s DFM plus DFX, all in one environment.

Just to explore how that works: From our 3D CAD system of choice, we can kick off an analysis in aP Design, and in a minute or two, you get very valuable manufacturing and cost intelligence back without waiting for feedback, trying to arrange a review meeting, or getting opinions from anyone else.

What we get straight away is DFM results. These can be sorted by severity of DFM issue or by issue type. So we can actually filter out the most critical things and address those first. We also get to see any features that are possible but are just driving cost. We can look at those separately. That might be an additional setup, holes of different sizes, things like that.

We also get a full breakdown of how this part needs to be manufactured. A design engineer who may not consider every step in that process can actually get visibility into it. You can see graphically which step is driving cycle time or fully burdened cost. Then we can compare lots of variations on that. Nice and easy, graphically side by side, we can consider lots of different criteria all in one view.

I said at the start that design engineers are always responsible for cost, but very rarely accountable for it. So spending time in aPriori could be seen as an extra job. But with the Design Value Dashboard, everything that goes through aPriori is now measured. We can see the value that the time spent using aPriori actually delivers through cost avoidance. That platform really gives you everything you need to evaluate profitability, sustainability, and manufacturability. It’s really giving you everything you need to ensure the success of a product.

There’s a lot that’s gone into it recently as well. I just wanted to give you four highlights from the last few releases. I think in the last 12 months, these are all things that have been added.

The first one is progress tracking. That all rolls up into the Design Value Dashboard. Being able to set a baseline and then track the progress that you’ve made, whether it’s through design changes or manufacturing changes, and have that rolled up and quantified, is a really useful way of seeing which direction you’re going when it comes to cost and manufacturability.

Secondly, there are more ways to analyze the model. Looking at thickness analysis, looking at flow appraisals. There are a lot of tools in there where you can see a range of different criteria and different KPIs all in one environment. You can see where you need to make changes to the design to optimize it.

For plastic parts, looking at flow appraisals and how the material flows into the mold is a really useful visualization that you can do very quickly in aPriori rather than sending it to a specialist, again losing that design momentum. Rather than sending it to injection mold flow analysis tools, you can get a very quick appraisal inside aPriori alongside the cost.

Lastly, a new concept is what we call Designs. This is a way of maintaining a digital thread between different CAD files. As the CAD file name changes, we can actually link them back together. So if your PLM system changes the CAD file name, or if you change the CAD file name before it’s managed, you can actually link them back together and maintain that thread.

That means you can make sure you’ve got the progress tracking for cost, and it all rolls up into the dashboard. So you’ve got that justification for all the time spent analyzing.