Like all aspects of the product development process, to justify its existence, simulation and test productivity are becoming an evermore pressing issue. Vendors say that in many cases, customers are demanding significant tangible proof of ROI in months, not years.

A major obstacle to wider acceptance of virtual prototyping and manufacturing simulation is a persisting lack of interoperability between CAD, CAM, and digital prototyping in the bigger PLM scenario. In this context, working toward data interoperability is not regarded as a value-added activity. Overall, however, one of the primary goals of digital test and simulation is to make the overall engineering activity sequence more of a value center and less of a cost center. Another goal is the ability to simulate the entire product lifecycle – from concept through production through sustainment to retirement.

Integrating the analytical, virtual, and physical is disruptive and is an obstacle to acceptance because the integration forces people to work differently than they had done previously. This integration only works through evolutionary implementation, and not necessarily everything all at once.

Many of the digital prototyping tools are still too difficult to use, and vendors need to pay more attention to ease of learning/use. Ease of use is important because vendors, even Tier 1 automotive suppliers, with their low margins cannot afford to hire and employ Ph.D.s to run their digital prototyping software.

On the other hand and in their defense, though, these same vendors are not interested in simplifying (“dumbing-down”) their software so much that they can solve only relatively simple problems. This is a big issue, and one that is even bigger than CAD, where ease of learning/use have made great strides for most vendors the past couple of years. Conversely, many vendors feel that the legacy workforce is not well-suited or qualified for the digital prototyping tools available today.

One way to address the ease of use issue is to provide a scaleable user interface on test/analysis applications to suit different user needs and skill levels at different times.This is tough to address because it requires flexibility and adaptability.

Finally, there is the trust factor that can be an obstacle. In the simulation/test arena, there is an adage that roughly goes, “Everyone trusts test results except test engineers, and everyone trusts analysis results except analysts.” Just about everyone agrees, however, that even with the best digital methods, physical testing will never go away.

The decision of whether to use physical versus digital prototyping is a delicate balance of tradeoffs. In fact, many companies employ virtual testing and simulation as a decision-making tool for conducting physical testing.

So how will digital prototyping ultimately succeed? It’s not hardware or software that makes or breaks digital prototyping, it’s people. While great people can overcome marginal or bad hardware and software, marginal people can cause the best hardware and software to fail. In this context, digital prototyping is no different than any other technical endeavor with regard to the absolute importance of the “people factor” for success.