It’s no secret that in many advanced economies, the cost of employing engineers has skyrocketed over the past decade while the relative cost of hardware and engineering software has reduced significantly. This is certainly true in Australia and New Zealand and we see that our customers are constantly looking to improve the productivity of their engineering / R&D teams.
In the first instance, the use of 3D CAD, PLM and Simulation tools provide significant cost savings to organisations who use a simulation-driven product development process to reduce their reliance on physical prototypes, and allow engineers to identify problems in their designs as early as possible. However, we don’t often speak about the benefits of providing an optimal licence configuration for those same engineers – how can you make sure that they are getting maximum use of the engineering software that is available to them?
Licences of simulation tools can typically be purchased as either “Bundles” or separate “PrepPost” & “Solver” increments. Bundles will typically provide the cheapest entry-point to all the tools needed to complete a given FEA or CFD simulation, but will often introduce unintended bottlenecks that stop engineers from being productive – just imagine your very expensive engineering resource twiddling their thumbs because they are waiting for a colleague’s solver run to finish before they are able to look at the results of their own simulation!
“I really like the way we have set up our ANSYS CFD licenses because I can be setting up my models or looking at results even if my colleagues are using the solver” Rico Garcia, Product Development Engineer at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare
A separate “PrepPost” & “Solver” licence configuration provides greater flexibility and allows each organisation to tailor the number of licences to their team’s needs: for instance, it is common for many engineering teams to have at least 2 PrepPost licences for every 1 Solver licence (of course, with those Solver licences supercharged by appropriate HPC licences). In this way, a team of 2-3 engineers is very likely to be able to access sufficient licences for basic meshing, setup or post-processing tasks; while also submitting solver runs to a queue on a workstation/cluster which is utilised 24/7 (obviously with HPC licences scaled appropriately to match the number of cores available). In our experience, this configuration often provides the optimal blend of user productivity and solver throughput.
In reality, the “best” configuration for each company will vary, and LEAP works closely with all customers to uniquely tailor a licence package to suit your individual needs. Until the end of 2016/17 Financial Year, special offers are available to customers in Australia and New Zealand. If you feel that your licence configuration is currently sub-optimal or under-utilised, or you’d simply like to improve the productivity of your engineering team, please contact your account manager at LEAP today to arrange an individual consultation.
