The Business Case for Simulation-Led Design

Leveraging simulation throughout the design cycle can help engineers work more efficiently while creating better designs. However, it is sometimes difficult to communicate the value of simulation to managers and executives—but it’s critical if you want more investment in better, faster simulation tools and infrastructure. 

During the 2024 Digital Engineering Design & Simulation Summit, consultant Mark Meili, who was formerly responsible for modeling and simulation strategy as a way to make money for P&G, discussed digital technologies as a business strategy, specifically how to build and carry out a strategy to keep you ahead of competition. He opened his session by presenting a number of what-if questions for doing design better at your company:

• What if you could obtain deep insights without physical prototypes and learn in hours versus weeks?
• What if you could reduce the cost of what you manufacture with equal or potentially better performance than today?
• What if your organization was 30% to 50% more productive and 50% faster to market with new initiatives?
• And his biggest what-if: What if your finance department and business leadership saw you as a strategic advantage to your company?

“One thing I learned [from my career], both good and bad, is that digital work processes are inherently disruptive to established companies. For those of you who work for startups and you’ve always done it this way, you accept that that’s the way it is,” Meili says. “But for established companies that have ways of doing things, moving to digital work processes is disruptive. If you’re going to be disruptive in a constructive way, you have to be strategic.”

“Business strategic value doesn’t just happen. It requires intent,” according to Meili. “You have to be purposeful to obtain that value.”

Meili works closely with the NAFEMS ASSESS Initiative, which has published a paper on “Understanding the Path to Realizable Business Benefits Through Engineering Simulation.”

In that paper, ASSESS asserted that while engineering simulation is expanding at most companies, its use is still mostly reactive/tactical and focused on improving past processes. While simulation provides a number of important benefits, it is also a high-cost investment.

According to the paper: “Engineering Simulation that is performed strategically delivers value to product and process development, leading to improved business metrics, a better understanding of product and process function, a better knowledge of the physics behind products and even the creation of entirely new and innovative industrial segments.” 

Simulation provides business benefits in time reduction, cost reduction, increased innovation and increased safety. Because simulation can help better refine and identify good designs earlier in the process, it can also help companies avoid costly late-stage problems that would otherwise not be detectable until expensive prototypes were built and physical testing conducted.

McKinsey & Co. (working with NAFEMS) has also presented research on the business benefits of simulation, and at the 2024 ASSESS Summit, reported they found companies could achieve a 20% to 30% time to market improvement with simulation, and 5% to 30% improvement in product performance, depending on the application. 

In a recent blog, Dassault Systèmes (SOLIDWORKS) also outlined ways that simulation can benefit startups specifically. By using virtual testing, modeling and prototyping, the company suggests, startups can more quickly validate market needs, accelerate design innovation, improve profitability through balancing quality and affordability and potentially access more funding as they are able to demonstrate progress without building costly prototypes.

Ansys also published a white paper outlining simulation business benefits, with a focus on increased efficiency, faster innovation, earlier decision making and late-stage error avoidance. 

According to the paper: “Using the simulation-driven design approach, engineers independently gain deep, actionable insights into the performance of designs. They don’t need to involve expert analysts or testing engineers. With such insight, engineers make better decisions to guide modifications into a feasible zone of performance. With feasible designs, engineers hand their work off to expert analysts, where it passes simulation verification, and then to test engineers, where it passes prototype tests. Overall, engineers uncover a feasible design far more quickly without taking up the time of expert analysts or testing engineers.”

But communicating the benefits of simulation has been difficult for engineers in some contexts, in part because they do not speak the same “language” as the executives approving these investments. Being able to explain benefits beyond efficiency is also important. If you tell some chief financial officers that you can improve engineer efficiency by 20%, their response might be to fire 20% of the engineers.

“We must learn to speak to the business,” Meili says. “Finance is your friend. Time to market is valued by the business, so you have to understand the value of agility and how it is communicated. The finance people are not going to appreciate your models. If you educate finance people around what’s in it for the business, they will rapidly become your biggest sponsor.”

In the ASSESS paper, the organization outlines a few basic steps in deploying simulation strategically to underpin business goals. Those include: 

• Establishing Business Goals: What does the organization want to accomplish with simulation?
• Understanding the Elements of an Engineering Simulation Infrastructure: These include experienced people; efficient processes and procedures to define simulation workflows; capable methods to define how to model specific required physics; the right tools for modeling; representative models that reflect design intent; reliable/accessible technical data to define specifications, parameters, etc.; and sufficient computing infrastructures and resources to execute complex simulations.
• Establishing an Engineering Simulation Maturity Framework and Assessment Guide: This helps identify what the company is already doing well, and what can be improved, and provides target metrics.
• Planning & Prioritizing Improvements: If there are maturity gaps, they should be prioritized based on business goals and improvement actions.
• Establishing Engineering Simulation Governance: Having procedures to ensure and enhance the reliability of predictions based on simulation, and establishing confidence and credibility in those results.
• Leveraging an Engineering Simulation Infrastructure: This uses organizational goals to define product and business objectives, and then leverages those objectives to drive development of the above capabilities (like infrastructure and governance).

In his presentation, Meili shared three aspects to attaining value for your business:

1. A desire to be strategic/maximize business impact

2. Document work and partner with finance

3. Strategic communication of intent and results

(For more strategies and to listen to the entire on-demand session, click here.)

It’s important to conduct a before-and-after analysis that measures the total costs of product development to provide credibility and establish the cost baseline. “You need to have documentation of what you did, so years later you can provide an accurate savings figure,” Meili says. Those cost savings can come from shifting physical testing and prototyping to virtual testing and prototyping, as well as time savings for staff involved in those processes. 

It’s also important to focus on things like safety improvements, better product quality (that can reduce repair/replacement or warranty costs in many industries) and faster innovation.

“In some corporate cultures, budget reduction can be seen as ‘losing’ because it’s a status symbol,” Meili says. “Goals should also be aspirational; focusing just on lower costs is not aspirational.”

In the McKinsey report, future value drivers for simulation were focused on many of these aspirational benefits. Among current simulation users, key value drivers were faster time to market (73%); reduction of product cost (72%); improved product performance (72%); reduction of engineering cost (70%); and zero prototyping (65%). 

As was noted at the 2025 ASSESS Summit, to achieve support for simulation initiatives, engineers need to be able to tell a “story” about the benefits of simulation that resonates with stakeholders in an emotional way, as well as in bottom-line benefits. That requires knowing decision makers and their priorities; educating these decision makers so they understand the benefits (and limitations) of simulation; and establishing strong relationships with key stakeholders. 

In other words, engineers need to broaden the audience to which they are pitching the business benefits of engineering simulation. 

To learn more about quantifying and communicating the business benefits of simulation, visit the ASSESS Initiative and check out the 2025 NAFEMS World Congress agenda, which includes a number of business impact sessions.