Today’s manufacturing companies face a three-tiered dilemma.  Product development cycles need to be dramatically reduced to remain competitive.  At the same time products are increasing in complexity while development budgets and resources remain static or are being decreased. This means that current tools and processes need to be fully examined and innovation becomes a critical priority.

How important is innovation? According to the Strategic Management Journal, for thought leaders in the industry, innovation is nothing short of critical. The journal’s recent report: The effect of introducing important incremental innovations on market share and business survival offers a direct and measurable correlation between innovation and market share: “The more often an industry incumbent was among the first to introduce important incremental product innovations the greater its market share, while adopting innovations that had been introduced by competitors had a small positive relationship with greater market share. The greater the number of competitors that introduced similar products, the greater the market share of firms that were first to market.”

Whether you’re talking about incremental design enhancements, exciting next generation products, or simply optimizing development time and costs, today’s product development processes hinge largely on both expanding and expediting the interaction between design and analysis. With simulation as the key to new product innovation, for these benefits to materialize, simulation results reporting must be fast, accurate, and useful to design teams.

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