SimScale: Empowering Automotive Suppliers to Innovate Faster with SimScale's Cloud-Native Simulation

The automotive industry today is undergoing an accelerating shift driven by digitalization, electrification, sustainability, and artificial intelligence. At the center of this marked transformation are suppliers, who find themselves at the forefront of unprecedented challenges. From the dramatic change towards electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles to the relentless pursuit of autonomous driving capabilities, automotive suppliers find themselves in the midst of a struggle for faster innovation and maximized efficiency. The challenge is compounded by compressed timelines and stringent ESG criteria, adding layers of complexity and demanding agility and innovation from suppliers like never before. That’s why many suppliers and OEMs are incorporating digital engineering into their workflows, seeking broader design space exploration, fewer design mistakes, and lower physical testing expenses.

This is where engineering simulation, particularly cloud-native simulation, becomes a key solution for automotive suppliers. SimScale’s customers in the automotive industry have been able to leverage the power of cloud-native simulation to create better designs faster and streamline their workflow, boosting product performance and time-to-market in the process. This has positioned SimScale at the heart of automotive design as the simulation tool for suppliers to accelerate innovation.

Supporting numerous leading automotive companies like ITW, ARaymond, and Nobel, SimScale has been helping engineering teams leverage simulation differently, not as a final validation step but underpinning the entire design process as a decision-making tool. This has enabled them to collaborate through design iterations faster and fully virtually. As a result, they boosted their engineering innovation all while increasing their engineering efficiency.

As a cloud-native simulation platform, SimScale makes high-fidelity engineering simulation truly accessible anytime and anywhere directly in a web browser. Anyone who has used engineering simulation before knows the limitations that come with legacy simulation tools, from deployment and expertise bottlenecks to hardware insufficiency, siloed workflows, and scalability issues. Being fully in the cloud, SimScale transcends these limitations and enables a streamlined workflow with decentralized simulation use, immediate accessibility, real-time collaboration, and simulation scalability while enabling experts to maintain central visibility and quality control. This is further enhanced by a user-friendly interface, multiple physics capabilities, and a comprehensive suite of simulation capabilities that can be used in almost every automotive application area.

Co-founder and CEO David Heiny is determined to help engineers innovate faster and enable organizations to deploy simulation much broader than previously possible.

“Engineering simulation has to be fully accessible at any scale and from anywhere so that engineers can evaluate design decisions with minimal lead times and thereby innovate faster. SimScale is a next generation simulation platform that seamlessly integrates all elements of an end-to-end engineering simulation workflow, enabling broad and early simulation use technically and economically viable to any organization.”

As automotive suppliers seek to maintain their competitive edge in the marketplace, they need to consider changing their product development processes in order to navigate this challenging and fast-changing terrain. With legacy simulation’s siloed workflows, protracted lead times, and slow design iteration cycles, such limitations may lead to underperforming products and missed deadlines, which would ultimately lead to lost OEM projects and a potential drop in market share. In other words, as a supplier, adapting and improving your processes in a dynamic and competitive landscape like the automotive sector is vital to maintaining and growing your market share.

That’s why a shift to a fully digital design and engineering system is necessary. To advance product design cycles, automotive suppliers need faster iterations, more agility, and quicker decision-making. This is what SimScale is enabling organizations with today. Thanks to SimScale’s accessibility, organizations can deploy simulation broadly across different teams while centralizing quality control. It also allows for integrating simulation earlier in the design process, which enables not only simulation experts but also design engineers to leverage simulation as they optimize their product designs. This is crucial in catching design problems early, thus reducing costly redesigns and iterations, which in turn leads to a more efficient development process. Many leading companies have benefited significantly from simulating earlier and broader with SimScale.
Today, more than ever, incorporating the right technology into your workflow is critical for success. The efficiency gains with cloud-native simulation are tangible and transformative. Accelerating simulation processes translates to faster design iterations, enabling automotive suppliers to meet compressed timelines and stay ahead of the competition.

One key benefit that intrinsically boosts efficiency and is unique to cloud-native simulation is parallel simulation. Thanks to its high-performance computing (HPC) elasticity, cloud-native simulation allows unlimited simulation size and simultaneous simulation runs without needing to manage a data center. In other words, your team can run as many simulations as they need at the same time without being limited by any hardware constraints. This accelerates the simulation turnaround time and helps save significant time that would otherwise be wasted running one simulation after another.

Furthermore, the advent of AI and generative design in recent years has opened new avenues for automotive suppliers, and it’s vital to understand how to incorporate such technologies. However, next-generation engineering workflows such as generative design and AI do not work with legacy desktop data silos. They require data accessibility across the whole database. Cloud-native simulation ensures data availability in a way that is immediately accessible for AI, generative, or optimization workflows. Enabling all simulations on one platform is a key aspect of efficiently managing your data rather than attempting to consolidate data from different silos.

In a nutshell, the message is clear: to thrive in this race of electric and hydrogen advancements and increasing customer expectations, automotive suppliers must embrace a 100% digital engineering workflow. The imperative is to innovate faster and increase engineering efficiency simultaneously. Cloud-native simulation emerges as the linchpin in achieving this delicate balance by enabling engineering teams to navigate design iterations rapidly and entirely in the virtual realm.

By integrating this transformative technology into their workflows, Tier 1 suppliers can usher in a new era of digital engineering, one marked by increased innovation, efficiency, and competitiveness. As Nobel, ARaymond, and ITW have demonstrated with SimScale, the journey towards a fully digital engineering workflow is not just a necessity—it's the key to securing a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving automotive industry.