By Mihails Scepanskis, CEO and founder of CENOS
To be frank, current engineering design sucks. It’s slow, often applied randomly, and is just too expensive. There is also a huge shortage of trained engineers and many engineers are reaching retirement age soon. New entrants to the profession are thin on the ground and they are struggling to get to grips with current engineering software. As a former academic and engineering consultant specializing in numerical simulation and modeling, I feel I am well qualified to say that today’s software is too bloated and difficult to learn for newly qualified engineers.
As a result, the quality of engineering design is suffering. Products across all manufacturing sectors are taking too long to design and don’t perform as well as they could when they reach production. This is costing manufacturers money they shouldn’t have to spend and reducing profits; it’s costing us money as consumers with products that are not as efficient as they could be; and it’s costing the planet with energy and material wastage that could easily be avoided with better pre-production design.
If you add it all up, we estimate that manufacturers could be saving hundreds of billions of dollars annually by getting to grips with product and process design and engineering software.
That’s quite a list of gripes. Let’s dig in and see what’s going on.
The end of engineering?
Becoming an engineer and going into the profession used to be a means of social and career uplift for people, but not so much anymore. The number of engineers in the USA, Germany, and many other manufacturing economies is declining. Fifty percent of all engineers are reaching retirement age in the next five years, as was noticed by Abhinav Barnwal, after his experience working with leading industrial manufacturers in Germany. Software development and robotics is where today’s STEM grads go for well-paying jobs, and the manufacturing industry is now suffering from an acute talent shortfall.
Part of the problem is that many large product companies have outsourced their supply chain to smaller manufacturers, and these have, in turn, outsourced to even smaller suppliers. To win these contracts, and then keep the client for future projects, these small suppliers are cutting costs to the bone. To show a profit on a project, they have to cut the number of design iterations. Whereas three iterations used to be quite normal, today the ideal is one — two at most. At the same time, cost cutting means that these design engineers have little leeway to purchase or subscribe to increasingly expensive software tools, with their excess capabilities.
Likewise, training for new entrants. Specialists have zero incentive to encourage new entrants to the profession, as they represent competition. And the smaller companies who want to expand tend to operate on such thin margins to get a business off the ground that there is little budget available for items with a risk-laden payback (“what if my trainee is poached?”) measured in multiple years.
As a result, and compounding the shortage of engineers, newly qualified engineers are not being given the learning time afforded to previous generations to gain practical design experience. Engineering simulation software suites, as an example, are large – bloated, even – and require a huge investment in time to master. These legacy software tools are also too expensive for the smaller manufacturing businesses that happen to employ the vast majority of all engineers. As a result, most engineers lack access to high-end modeling because of prohibitive costs and unrealistic training times. According to a Gartner survey, 40% of engineers want to use this software but can’t.
Efficiency is a function of good design
Why does access to (and the ability to use) simulation software matter so much? Computer simulation of a part or a product or a process is where production efficiency, mechanical efficiency and energy reduction are literally engineered. Computer simulation replaces physical prototyping and lab testing, allowing for multiple design iterations prior to physical prototyping.
Designs can be refined in stages or iterations, without the time and expense of producing prototypes. Being able to use good simulation software effectively — the words “good” and “effectively” are really important — also reduces iteration design cycles and therefore saves costs and increases margins. We can also begin combining emerging technologies such as 3D printing with simulation tests, (as opposed to tooling-up to manufacture a one-off prototype), which means that it becomes economically viable to achieve previously unseen levels of efficiency in far fewer iterations.
Yet too little of this is happening in mainstream engineering today. Better engineering design — and all the benefits that flow from that — is being held back by use of the wrong tools. “Crisis” is not too strong a word, in my opinion.
Redesigning the world
And it’s not just a crisis for engineers and manufacturers. The planet is in something of a mess right now and it needs all the help it can get from better design. Humanity now uses 100 billion tonnes of resources every year, 90% of which are virgin materials extracted and processed from the Earth. Only 30% of this raw material becomes something permanent and just 8.6% is recycled. The rest is discarded, thrown away or incinerated for fuel.
Manufacturers, who process much of this massive quantity of resources, are responding to society’s demands by getting better at resource and energy usage. But by 2050 there will be 10 billion people living on Earth. That means increased demand for buildings, phones, TVs, vehicles, everything — and the energy and materials required to make them. As a result, approximately 19% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from the manufacturing industry, and by 2050 the growth in population will require at least twice the energy and materials.
Getting marginally better is not going to be good enough. We basically need to rethink how we do just about everything with engineering design in the front line. Critically, we also cannot afford to continue to hobble young engineering talent with incomplete and overly expensive toolsets, when viable alternatives are readily available.
The switch to open source simulation for engineering
People are trying to find solutions. Academic projects such as Paraview, OpenFOAM, and Code_Aster have brought us new, open-source software tools that tackle specific aspects of the engineering modeling and simulation spectrum. The motivation is that today’s commercial software suites prioritize breadth of capability and sometimes are not specific enough for the sorts of tasks at the academic level.
It’s a partial solution: while these tools are open-source and therefore available to any engineer, regardless of budget, they are not easy to use. They were often designed for a one-off job or for the use of one person or team. Academics do not have the time or motivation to iron out the UI niceties, or provide detailed documentation and support that we accept with wider-market software tools. In short, these tools are not products!
But properly designed, open-source simulation software can and will make a huge difference in engineering. One quick example: an engineer at a car components manufacturer needs to redesign an induction coil. These inductors typically have a short life and the primary goal was to improve the coil design to achieve a longer lifetime and lower production costs. The engineer tested design candidates virtually and 3D printed the final coil, reducing tooling costs by 90% per part and cutting energy usage by 30% too, with an overall saving of more than €1 million annually.
With so many barriers holding back greater sustainability, you might have been surprised to hear that access to usable software is high on the list of issues facing manufacturers. The above example shows what’s at stake; it involved one part, in one company, in one market, in one country. Now multiply the energy savings across all the manufacturers around the globe.
In money terms too, the benefits are clear cut. Add in the savings to the end user in terms of lower maintenance and less frequent replacements and you can easily see that the global figure of hundreds of billions of dollars that we have proposed is far from an exaggeration.
Given the environmental necessity to redesign so much of our manufactured world, and the structural forces holding back software tools from rising to the challenge, the emergence of a new way of approaching engineering design is timely indeed. Creating new efficiencies in engineering through digital design and simulation will bring era-defining improvements to supply chains and manufacturing everywhere.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.