By Durrell Rittenberg, VP Product Management, Tecplot, Inc.
Over the last 12 years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the brightest engineers around the world. I’ve worked closely with groups designing the next generation of manned and unmanned flight vehicles, with scientists modeling solar flares, and with researchers investigating atmospheric conditions that lead to global warming.
Recently, many of these engineering groups have contracted in size. For some of them the contraction was due to sequestration, for others it was due to the breakup of large engineering groups into smaller and leaner project teams. A good friend of mine from a large aerospace company shared with me that right after sequestration his group decreased by 50%. It was a dark time, and many people looked for opportunities elsewhere while others decided to retire.
About eight months later, I ran into him at a conference and was surprised to hear that he was doing great. He said he had more work now than before sequestration, but his group had not hired additional engineers and were not planning to hire any in the near future. I asked him how he managed to get more work done with less people. “Painfully,” he said, “I end up looking for any way to automate anything that will help me get the work done.”
His group has adopted robust engineering principles to analyze their ever more challenging design problems. These principles emphasize evaluating multiple designs, which increases not only the size of each project, but also the number of potential designs being evaluated for each project. The net result has been fewer engineers to tackle larger, more complex engineering problems.
Feedback from other engineers over the last two years has confirmed the need for tools to help engineers tackle these modern design problems. Here at Tecplot, we’ve been improving both the performance and usability of our tools to help our customers speed discovery. The upcoming webinar on June 12 will show you some of the work we’ve been doing. Register now: 4 Keys to Making Faster and More Accurate Design Decisions.
Performance improves the speed of discovery
In 2012 we released Tecplot Chorus to address the needs of engineers involved in parametric analysis. Very soon we will release Tecplot 360 EX which is designed to speed up computational results analysis workflows. Tecplot 360 EX introduces our newest technology, subzone load-on-demand (SZL). Engineers using SZL to perform common simulation analysis tasks on large computation grids will see much faster than ever before. With this technology, large, high fidelity simulations can be processed with the same speed as low fidelity, small mesh simulations. Find out details about this technology in our white papers and recorded webinars.
Click reduction increases the speed of discovery
In addition to general performance improvements with large data, we’ve invested in improving the overall usability of Tecplot 360. To do this, we rebuilt Tecplot 360 from the ground up using new UI technology. We preserved common workflow elements to reduce switching cost for existing users. Tasks like extracting cutting planes that once took 15 clicks, now take only one. Other usability improvements include creating PowerPoint-like multipage layouts, and using context menus to set properties directly on a plot. See the new features in these quick videos.
The goal of these investments has been to address the needs of people like my friend who are trying to get more done with their available resources. Over 300 engineers and scientists worldwide, including my friend, have helped make this release possible through their participation in the Tecplot 360 EX Beta program.
I personally want to thank all of the Beta Testers for helping to make Tecplot 360 EX a reality!
