Altair Partner Alliance Adds Lean Design Technology from Munro & Associates

TROY -- The Altair Partner Alliance announced Wednesday that its offering now includes complexity management tool Design Profit, from Munro & Associates.

Design Profit assists product design engineers by exposing waste and risk in their designs so they are able to make educated decisions to reduce design complexity and weight for downstream stakeholders.

Design Profit is applicable across industries including aerospace, automotive, marine, consumer goods, defense, industrial, and medical.  It is most beneficial to companies that want to reduce waste and lower costs of developing and manufacturing products.

Both Altair and Munro are based in Troy.

"Design Profit adds a comprehensive set of tools that are advantageous for designers striving to optimize their manufacturing processes," said David Foreman, vice president of Munro & Associates. "Lean design is an emerging capability that offers vast benefits as far as cost savings and efficient product development to the end users, which will now include those who are members of the APA."

Starting out in Design for Manufacturability and Assembly, Design Profit uses symbols in a simple and methodical process to model a product or process. The model conveys design and manufacturing complexity in a visual and easy to understand format. Design Profit allows the user to see the big picture overview in terms of cost, time, quality, material, weight, investment, and ROI along with many other critical data points. Ultimately this allows designers to have a deeper understanding of the product's lifecycle design costs as a whole, both currently and in the future. Embedded images, videos, documents and notes also help illustrate and retain product information.

Quality Report Card, a module integrated within Design Profit, is able to identify and model root causes that affect costs, such as scrap, rework and warranty issues. These costs are rolled up into the cost of quality and allows companies to save valuable resources that otherwise could have been wasted. Quality Report Card automatically generates data-rich reports that are highly customizable and exportable. These reports include an executive summary for quick decision making, as well as Bills of Materials (BOMs), Bills of Process (BOPs), weight reports, distribution charts and process sheets.

"Munro & Associates have been at the forefront of the DFA/DFM process since the very beginning and Altair is excited to have them as part of the Altair Partner Alliance," said Timothy Smith, Director of Design Engineering at Altair. "The Design Profit software tool fits extremely well within an optimization-driven design process. Concept designs can be evaluated exceedingly early to ensure that only the most robust, cost effective designs pass on to the next phase of product development. We expect that product design engineers in a myriad of industries will find this tool beneficial in helping them develop better products, with an improved bottom line."

Design Profit provides a collaborative environment where a variety of departments can access the information to better understand design complexity and quality issues. This means that the engineering department can easily explain to manufacturing, finance, and other groups and suppliers their findings earlier in their design process to help minimize total life cycle costs. Design Profit brings cost accounting and accountability up front in the development process much like finite element analysis and other virtual engineering tools that are essential to product success.

Available for the last 12 years, Altair's innovative unit-based licensing system allows HyperWorks users customizable access to a growing portfolio of applications, optimizing their return on investment (ROI) by making more than 28 in-house developed applications available by use of a single pool of recyclable HyperWorks units (HWUs).

After experiencing this original licensing model's success, Altair has offered the opportunity for third-party companies to run their own applications under this unit-based system, a collaboration now known as the Altair Partner Alliance. The overall flexibility of these HWUs empowers users and allows them access to the largest and most complete suite of CAE applications available, making the benefits to participating HyperWorks customers infinite. The ROI increases for users each time a new application is added to the offering, since any of the partner programs can be accessed using the same leased HWUs they are already using to run HyperWorks. This makes more than 55 additional applications available at no incremental cost or long-term commitment.

HyperWorks users can download Design Profit at www.altairalliance.com/designprofit. To learn more about Design Profit, please attend one of the introductory webinars being held on June 12 at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Eastern time. These webinars will be hosted by Altair and presented by Munro & Associates.

More at www.altair.com, www.simulatetoinnovate.com, or  www.altairalliance.com.