"Foundries use a 5,000-year-old technology and there has not really been anything new," Christof Heisser, president of MAGMA Foundry Technologies, says. "Simulation is really the only thing that has happened to the industry that has made a fundamental change in how you run your foundry and how you make money."
There are no secrets in a manufacturer's toolbox anymore.
In this age of high-tech factories and connected, collaborative production, the tools and software that companies need to compete are, for the most part, too well known and well advertised for anyone to claim proprietary interest. From ERP and MRP, to CAD and simple spreadsheets, there is little variation anymore in the tools employed by manufacturers to drive production, though they employ them with vastly different results.
This is a conundrum central to the research of Jim Brown, president of the industry research company, Tech-Clarity.
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"Everybody is facing the same challenges today," he says. "These challenges don't necessarily change much between the top performing and average manufacturing companies. Even the strategies they take to overcome them don't vary much."
With such little variation between them, he says, "the question becomes what are they doing differently? If they have the same strategy and use the same technologies, they must be accomplishing it in a different way."
In other words, the only secret left to manufacturing success is in the particular high-tech cocktail of technologies and software that companies mix to lead their production.
Surveying the high and average performing companies to answer this, Brown found one sizeable gap in equal deployment that might make all the difference: the use of simulation in product design.
"What really set these companies apart tended to be not necessarily their strategy or their focus, but the way they were going about designing product," he says.
There is a wide margin here, too. The top 17% of companies in Brown's "top performing" category those that show profit margins and revenue growth more than twice that of average companies are 49% more likely to use simulation software as a key component of this design process.
The perfect technology cocktail, this seems to say, requires a simulation base.
