The most expensive belief in CFD analysis

My job is talking with engineering companies about solving their flow and thermal design challenges with CFD analysis and quantifying the business reasons for doing it. Invariably the business case involves cost and return, risk mitigation, reduced material and testing costs, increase product performance, lifetime etc. Each week, on average, I speak with 15 different companies and one single idea prevails as the most expensive belief in all of CFD analysis. Caution! This might ruffle a few feathers.

Yesterday I chatted with an engineering manager at a mid-size company. He’s responsible for a team of 6 mechanical engineers that design four product lines. His engineers all do CAD, testing and even manufacturing quality assurance. None of his engineers have a particular slant or background with thermal or fluid dynamics; let alone CFD software. Given the current challenge his team is facing - to pack additional higher wattage components into an existing housing AND keep the thing cool AND have it done in a few months to fulfill a customer order I was astonished at his plan… I asked him about the scope and how our team might help and he said… “we have some kind of CFD software we got, so we’re good.”

Since the team simply has “some kind of CFD software” they’ll just pick it up and get reliable answers to make good decisions. Wow! The idea that just having software solves problems is a true belief out there. This belief wastes enormous amounts of time, money and effort in the engineering world. We see it all too often and frankly, it’s troubling. I wish statistics existed that could shed light on how much time and money companies spend wrestling with analysis software before it becomes shelf-ware after being sold an “easy to use” solution.

To be clear, there is no doubt a place for CFD software at many companies. I believe it’s only successful when it’s an engineer assigned to being the CFD analyst. And even then it’s not always the best place to invest resource and money.

Think of this. Our company deals with hundreds of thousands in taxes. Corporate tax code is an amazing thing especially dealing with multiple state offices. Perhaps one of those wonders of the world even. It would be easy to fall into the belief trap that all we need to do is get Turbo Tax software. But we don’t. In fact, we don’t actually do our taxes in house at all. We hire an outside professional tax firm for that. I was talking with a friend about this blog post and he asked me when we would hire an accountant on the staff. Why? That would be a huge investment of salary all other costs associated when we only need to spend a few thousand each quarter to get the project completed. (By the way, by professionals who know our company and our goals and know the code inside and out.) We know we get the right results with confidence every time without burning our time away from our core business – CFD analysis services.

The point I’m trying to strike at here is that just having CFD software doesn’t solve design problems. Typically it becomes a time waster trying to get it to work over and over.  

I know that somebody out there is gonna rip me up for this one, so let me have it.

Comments

[Paul Roszak]

I approach things from the belief that anybody can do anything - assuming they have enough time and motivation. Time is the most valuable thing we have. The better we invest it, the better results we get. In business, why would you want to invest your people's time in learning, trial, and error on anything outside of your core competencies? When you sit down to figure it all out, the costs to the business are much higher than hiring professionals to teach you just what you need to know.