The Challenge for Engineering Groups

Customers and CEOs are demanding that engineering groups quickly turn business concepts into design alternatives for profit-driving products. This requires fast and deliberate synchronization between different engineers and groups who are using multiple tools, across platforms, systems and continents. Engineers are operating in a landscape that is growing exponentially in complexity while software vendors continue to address enterprise solutions but fail to give consideration to engineers and their daily tasks.

Engineering groups are struggling to:

Keep track of 100s of files across multiple projects

Start or Restart studies without archaeological digs

Monitor differences for individual or project team members

Audit modeling/simulation artifacts and performance metrics

Instantly, revert designs, compare files, and resolve conflicts

Find time to explore additional design alternatives

Reduce the number of design errors

Manage projects consistently whether geographically dispersed or in the same building

Improve communication between engineers

Traditional approaches are at odds with the needs of engineers and the reality of coping with various tasks (structure, materials, tasks, etc) utilizing numerous tools and the difficulties of data exchange between the engineers that are using them. Many approaches involve inflexible, top-down, end-to-end strategies that are complex and costly to implement. They do not address the typical engineering group that must deal with turnover of engineers, vacations, illness, geographically dispersed teams, and the continual rise of 'design outsourcing'. Engineering groups need help with finding the bandwidth to explore additional design alternatives. Otherwise, time pressures and unrelenting complexity will continue to have a detrimental impact on innovation and a company's ability to meet the needs of a demanding marketplace.

Performance management remains an isolated process that is divorced from the work of engineers. Results are an integral part of the engineering process and therefore, the relationship between engineering assets and performance metrics is of paramount importance to engineers. Presently, access to results is cumbersome and it is difficult for engineers to clearly understand why results are either improving or degrading. This situation is exacerbated when dealing