Developing groundbreaking, competitive products is a comprehensive and complex endeavor that demands a fusion of creativity, the adoption of modern technologies such as AI/ML and a diverse range of skills throughout the organization. id8, a cloud-native collaborative engineering platform by Noesis Solutions empowers organisations to take full control of their engineering processes enabling them to unveil the full potential of their engineering data. Harnessing the potential of simulation data with advanced design space exploration options through powerful AI/ML technologies and simulation-driven data science capabilities, in a collaborative environment allows organisations to take data-driven decisions enabling them to create products for tomorrow.

Generate trusted datasets and turn them into valuable insights for product development and making data-driven decisions as quickly as possible is essential for every company today. In this conversation with David Franke, CEO at Noesis Solutions, we will discuss how design and development benefit from data-based approaches.

What challenges do companies currently have to overcome in product development?

In today's fast-paced global markets, companies face a variety of challenges. This includes managing the increasing complexity of their products, accelerating time to market, the ever-changing product requirements, and, of course, collaborating with globally distributed engineering teams. To be successful, companies need to gain a competitive advantage in their development processes. Inevitably, this means that multidisciplinary teams need to make innovative and informed decisions as quickly as possible, based on trustworthy data. For economic reasons, therefore, according to the already established consensus, development must take place virtually as far as possible. Today, however, it is important that, on the one hand, the possibilities for virtual product development are made available to a much wider audience in the environment and, on the other hand, that the product requirements and the virtual status quo are known to all developers at all times. The central foundation for this is formed by trustworthy engineering data sets, which either already exist or need to be created from scratch. At Noesis Solutions, we have developed a unique approach to these challenges – Data-Driven Collaborative Engineering.

What exactly is behind the approach?

In our data-driven world, design and optimization require an approach that prioritizes trustworthy technical data and makes it accessible to a wide range of our customers' employees. Of course, this can be existing as well as new data. Data-Driven Collaborative Engineering ensures data quality and simplifies the creation of new datasets based on best-practice development processes. As a result, cross-functional engineering teams are empowered to make informed decisions, share knowledge, build trust, and eliminate technical silos. By focusing on data-driven collaborative engineering, errors are reduced, costs are lowered, and time to innovation is shortened. Imagine being able to learn more easily from your existing data, or suddenly making complex, verified simulation processes for data generation available to design staff. New product designs can now be validated directly at the source. With the collective knowledge of your teams and trusted data as a basis for decision-making, engineers can identify new opportunities for innovative product designs much faster and more effectively. They can also use data and IT resources more efficiently to reduce costs and the environmental footprint of their product development.

So what does an ideal collaborative development process look like?

Let's take an example of a typical task statement where the teams with different skills responsible for the most important tasks are geographically dispersed. Design departments typically use a variety of commercial and proprietary software tools that run on different resources. By sharing best-practice engineering workflows on an open and collaborative platform, teams will be able to intuitively use state-of-the-art virtual engineering methods. State-of-the-art algorithms can be applied to these workflows and help to carry out even very time-consuming simulations economically. As a result, teams can suddenly manage technical complexities more easily and build even better products in less time and at less cost. Interactive dashboards help to extract key insights into product behavior and conduct real-time trade-off studies and optimizations. Team collaboration and communication is facilitated with a set of roles and permissions.

And that's what Noesis solutions make possible?

Yes, id8 enables Data-Driven Collaborative Engineering. Our tools give our customers the ability to solve the most complex engineering challenges in an intuitive way, whether by leveraging existing data or creating synthetic data from scratch. With interactive data analytics dashboards, companies are able to visualize product features with dashboards and make data-driven decisions without lengthy iterative meetings. We use a low-code environment to automate engineering processes, laying the foundation for the transition from digital shreds to digital threads. With machine learning and AI technology, we enable companies to generate reliable synthetic datasets with the least possible use of resources. This data can then be transformed into valuable knowledge and insights for design.

So it also democratizes technologies that would otherwise be reserved for experts?

Yes, simulation and automation tools have traditionally been the preserve of experts, and due to the complexity of the systems, they still need to be supervised by an expert. However, access to automated best-practice workflows allows companies to integrate different people from different skill areas and teams in different geographic locations into the ecosystem, thus speeding up the design process.

How does the solution support collaboration?

Collaboration is essential for the entire design process. That's why we offer an open, cloud-native, and auto-scaling platform that embeds design processes in a collaborative environment. id8 is compatible with any cloud provider, making it possible to access data anytime, anywhere via a web browser. It allows teams to create their design exploration or optimization strategy with an easy-to-use wizard and accelerate the design cycle while sharing and reusing workflows within the team. In addition, our solution allows users to easily create simulation apps themselves and then make them available within the company.

Who is the user of the Noesis solutions?

Our software tools cater to a wide range of stakeholders, including designers, simulation experts, research engineers, data analysts, data engineers, and decision makers. Our customers come from a wide variety of organizations around the world. From research institutes to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to large corporations, all looking to gain a competitive advantage. Our solutions are specifically designed for complex engineering projects in various industries, including automotive, aerospace, electronics, and consumer goods. Our goal is to provide our users with the tools and expertise they need to implement engineering at the highest level – regardless of the size of their company or industry.

For which product development projects is Data-Driven Collaborative Engineering suitable?

Noesis Solutions' expertise and tools are used in a very wide range of virtual product development projects, from the planning phase and product design to manufacturing and operations. We also bridge the gap to testing, as we give our customers the ability to incorporate test data into our solutions or intelligently create new test plans to keep expensive prototype testing to a minimum.

What role do you think AI and ML play in the modern development process?

We believe that artificial intelligence already plays an important role in the modern product development process, and this will only increase in the coming years. Any company that wants to secure a competitive advantage in the long term needs to use this technology. There are numerous AI-based solutions for various challenges in automation, security, natural language processing, etc. Noesis provides AI technologies that enable our users to effectively create simulation or hardware test plans, analyze engineering data faster, and create high-quality predictive models that enable them to make innovative decisions in real-time.

This interaction is an excerpt and translation of Mr. Franke’s discussion with Monika Zwettler, Editor, Konstruktions Praxis magazine - https://www.konstruktionspraxis.vogel.de/schnell-entscheidungen-treffen-noesis-solutions-interview-a...