There are around 40 simulation analysts in the Dana Power Technology group, one of four business units within Dana Holding Corp., along with hundreds of engineers in seven locations around the world. These are the men and women who design under-the-hood components for GM, Ford and Chrysler, and many other vehicle manufacturers: components like heat exchangers and gaskets, plastic covers and oil pans, baffles, separators, and thermo-acoustic protective shields.

The team is responsible for over a thousand new part introductions each year, and every one of those parts requires a virtual simulation and validation before physical prototyping. The number of parts going through simulation is increasing by about 20% each year, so getting a more efficient analysis process was mission critical, especially since it’s so easy to waste a lot of time rediscovering the same simulation time and again.

An Analyst is not a Barista

Imagine you are an analyst and you are asked to test a cylinder head gasket for a new model. Remember that as an analyst, you’ve always been at the top of your class. Everybody always told you how smart you are.

So even if there is a clear analysis process laid out for you, are you really going to follow it? Where’s the chance to apply your 20 years of grad school and demonstrate your value to the team? Instead, you experiment a little just to make sure that your solution is the best possible.

The problem with that approach, when repeated over thousands of parts, is that it doesn’t capture and leverage the collective knowledge of the team. At Dana, they made a commitment to leverage that collective knowledge. And what a difference it has made.

Managing Simulation Processes is a really big (ie - more than 10%) deal

Frank and his team set a goal to become 10% more efficient across the entire engineering organization. To do that they decided to upgrade their old processes with a new set of templates for simulating common parts and part families. When you appreciate that a simulation process can easily take 20-30 process steps, then you can appreciate how much time can be saved by reducing the number of simulation iterations.

But to ensure that the analysts would follow the new templates, they needed two things: i) a commitment from the analysts and ii) a CAE environment that would help, rather than hinder, conforming to those processes.

Frank was able to get the commitment. At a high level, everyone on the team understood that time was being wasted – time that could be better spent conducting more relevant analyses.

The next step was searching for a simulation environment that would allow the Dana team to build their templates in a fast and easy way, and that didn’t require them to change their existing tool sets. For example, the Dana team uses preprocessors from Altair (Simlab, Hypermesh) and Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA (Abaqus/CAE), FEA and fatigue solvers from SIMULIA (Abaqus, fe-safe), Moldflow, ThermoAnalytics (RadTherm), system engineering tools like Matlab/Simulink, Flowmaster and Dymola (also from Dassault Systèmes) and many others.

They wanted the team to work within the simulation management environment to access these tools rather than having to make the simulation management process an extra step.

The Dana CAE team evaluated simulation management solutions from MSC, Altair, Dassault Systèmes and Siemens.

The one that fit their requirements best was SIMULIA’s Simulation Lifecycle Management (SLM) application. Two reasons for their choice were: i) it was the most flexible out of the box. The Dana team didn’t want to have any software customizations so they could stay in step with the software’s upgrade path. Instead, they wanted to be able to apply the tool to their processes, and SLM from Simulia fit the best; and ii) the SIMULIA SLM application had full third-party software integration capabilities by way of connectors so that Dana can run their existing tools completely from within the simulation management environment.

It’s working. Dana has already reduced the number of simulation iterations by around 30%.

The project launched in production in the summer of 2013. This tool is a prerequisite to improve further efficiency over time so the analysts at Dana can spend ideally up to 50% of their time on new stuff, like improving the processes and ensuring that the templates are as effective as they can be. As you can imagine, in the highly iterative world of these analysts, the templates they design can be very complex with lots of steps and logic loops.

CAE is a Competitive Weapon at Dana

Frank claims that Dana has turned CAE into a competitive weapon in their highly competitive industry, using it to win more business.

He pointed out, “Any of our products can be manufactured anywhere,” so Dana can’t expect to win business just on price, quality and delivery times. Frank says Dana wins business based on technology. By this he means not just the product features, but also how Dana engineers and analysts work with their customers to bring a product to market.

Consider a common Dana product, such as a cylinder head gasket. Even though this is the part that Dana makes, the analysts will simulate it as part of a powertrain including 3rd party components to show a customer how those components interact with related parts of the assembly. This requires deep integration with the customer at an early stage to optimize the overall system. And it has led Dana to view itself as an engineering and innovation driven company.

Managing Simulation Data is a really big deal too

Analysts aren’t the only people who need simulation results. The design engineers, CAD operators, sales people, application engineers, manufacturing engineers and quality people all need to see the results of simulation data. Eventually they will all need access to the simulation environment.

Dana needed a backbone that can knit together an extremely complex series of processes and data from a huge range of subsystems.

That’s one of the benefits of a SLM or SPDM environment. It can automatically save all of the data associated with the analyses that were performed on a part, and make that data available to everyone in the organization who needs to see it.

The SIMULIA SLM environment at Dana, for example, doesn’t have a check-out check-in protocol. Instead, the simulation applications are launched from within the SLM interface, so the data collection happens without extra steps. The analyst doesn’t have to separately log the tool they were using or the material conditions or the boundary properties. Those things are all captured automatically. This is proving to be important intellectual property at Dana that was previously too difficult to capture.

A shared simulation data pool allows all of these users to see not only successful simulation results, but also the results of simulations that failed. As Bruce Hart of Dassault Systemes SIMULIA pointed out, “If a part fails in the field, you want to be able to prove to regulators that you ran the simulations according to your processes. You don’t want that data scattered around the organization on hard drives and USB keys.”

SLM / SPDM is not PLM

SLM/SPDM/PLM. Egad. What a Plethora of Acronyms (PoA)! Anyway, according to Frank, “organizations looking to deploy a simulation management solution aren’t going to replace their PLM systems.”

He says that simulation processes are more iterative, while the PLM processes move more along a straight line from concept to release for simulation. And in a comment that could draw some fire from PLM experts, Frank says that the external customer collaboration link has to be within the simulation management environment rather than in the PLM environment.

Like any enterprise software rollout, there have been some tough moments in Dana’s implementation of SIMULIA SLM. It takes time to build the templates and to learn a new environment. As a result, users are bound to experience some pain on adoption. Frank’s job as the leader was to remind the team of the commitment they made at the outset, and to inspire them to see it through.

So far the results have been impressive. Frank says he expects his team at Dana to eventually have more than 500 people accessing the simulation management environment, and that he believes they will meet their target of saving 10% of the team’s time, right across the board.

To learn more about simulation management at Dana, check out the article in this month’s SIMULIA Community News magazine.