- Prospective Customer spends loads of cash & time on prototyping.
- New Customer buys upfront CAE for cheap & fast virtual prototyping.
- Customer trains 8 multi-tasking engineers to use upfront CAE.
- 3 years later, Old Customer spends loads of cash & time on prototyping.
Over the last 9 years, I’ve had the thrill of seeing many customers smoke their competition by implementing upfront CFD to slash time-to-market and Cost-of-Goods-Sold. I’ve also taken a dagger to the heart when some customers follow steps 1-4 above instead.
This is usually caused by 6 or 7 possible pitfalls between steps 3 & 4.
I write about those all the time.
You might want to pay attention to a common little problem between 2 & 3, though:
No one owns INSTALLING THE DADGUM SOFTWARE!
If your company is new to upfront CAE, take a moment to identify these 3 specifics regarding the installation of your new software: when, who, & where. It’s amazing how often a company drops $100k on a software investment and then doesn’t get around to installing it for 6 months! You need to put someone in charge of this and hold their feet to the fire. Make friends with your neighborhood IT guy today!
You should ideally have the upfront CAE tool installed prior to training. Give your engineers a chance to kick the tires on their own, and they’ll have better questions for class. Don’t expect too much, though. Most of my customers are male engineers who don’t read manuals or ask for directions. Even when they are lost.
It’s okay if you can’t get your new Upfront CAE tool installed for everyone until the day after training. But with every week that goes by, your probability of eventually landing on step 4 shoots through the roof.
Life Upfront 