USS-POSCO was facing challenges in streamlining data reporting to improve decision-making speed and responsiveness to trends or problems. The company was heavily reliant on its overburdened IT staff for generating detailed data reports. The goal was to reduce the amount of time it took to answer business questions and move business analysis closer to end users. The company was looking for a solution that could quickly build a sound business intelligence system without heavy financial, time, or resource investment.

US Synthetic, a leading provider of polycrystalline diamond cutters (PDCs) for oil and gas exploration, faced challenges in reporting and analysis. The company's Made2Manage ERP system and internally developed custom tables contained large amounts of detailed data, but employees were not able to utilize that data in a meaningful way. Even the generic reports within Made2Manage were difficult to access, and creating ad hoc reports was even more time-consuming and inefficient. The company needed a solution that would provide real, accessible, and useful information at all levels within the organization. The company's non-linear floor made it challenging for managers to follow the product from work order to delivery. Because products may backtrack in the process flow and ultimately take a different route to completion, production managers were losing visibility of those products and their status.

Vax, a leading manufacturer and distributor of high-quality floorcare products, was facing challenges in producing sales and call centre performance analysis, monitoring supply chain freight movements, and delivering business intelligence (BI) in a visual context for users. The company lacked any specific software for business discovery and was making use of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The need for a more efficient and effective solution led to the acquisition of the QlikView business discovery platform in 2006. The initial goal was to track and drive sales and margin performance while helping to control expenses and overall operating costs.

Verdecora, a leader in “green” home and garden supplies, was facing challenges in providing improved and streamlined access to information, optimizing management of information, and developing new indicators for tracking. The company's expansion in available sales space translated into an increase in the quantity of products and information generated. One of Verdecora’s main concerns was how it could process and optimally manage all of this information, and, perhaps most importantly, provide agile access to that information – which was strategic for the company. Consequently, they began searching for a tool that would meet these needs, one that would ensure continued growth by correcting anomalies and offering real solutions.

Visionlab, a leading optical company in Spain, was facing challenges in extracting key indicators in real time, detecting bottlenecks, and improving the output of production processes. The company also wanted to decentralize data management across various areas. As the organization grew, system managers realized that using Microsoft Excel would be inadequate for optimal decision-making. In 2003, Visionlab decided to implement QlikView, a BI solution that they considered visual, easy to implement, and with a quick return on investment thanks to its short learning curve.

Zurich Insurance, a leading insurance-based financial services provider in the Nordic region, faced several challenges. They needed to better assess risks and business potential of insurance solutions, link together insurance systems while making them more adaptable and easier to use, and perform fast and flexible analyses on different customers, types of damages, countries, and products. The company's underwriters, who assess the risks and business potential of all insurance solutions, needed a tool that makes it easy to link different local databases together and perform fast and flexible analysis regarding different customers, types of damage, countries and products.

TWG, a leading food and beverages supplier in Hong Kong, was struggling with inefficient reporting processes that delayed decision-making. The company was using their legacy SAP ERP system to produce sales and CRM reports, but found it difficult to generate meaningful insights from the data. The process was manual and could take several hours to extract the data and then generate a report for management using Microsoft PowerPoint. This inefficiency was hindering the company's ability to make strategic decisions and maintain its market leader status.

Dorman Products, a leading supplier of automotive and heavy-duty replacement parts, was facing challenges in project and support testing cycles due to the large orders they were processing. The Quality Assurance (QA) team was responsible for ensuring optimal support for new products, enhancements, and bug fixes. However, they were struggling with addressing order-related issues in a timely manner. Each order could have several thousands of order lines, making it difficult and time-consuming to recreate and debug issues. The process to replicate and debug production problems was highly manual and involved many steps. The team recognized the need for a solution to streamline this multi-step process.

VanEck, an asset management company known for its innovative financial solutions, was looking to expand its reach into international markets. The company's philosophy of providing investors with access to opportunities that strengthen their portfolios led them to be one of the first asset managers to offer clients access to international markets. However, the challenge lay in effectively communicating with local investors about global growth opportunities. The company needed to translate their website content, regulatory documentation, and marketing materials into multiple languages to cater to different regions. Additionally, the rapidly growing market of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and exchange-traded notes (ETNs) presented a challenge in terms of marketing these products to a broad audience. The company also faced the challenge of maintaining balanced communication, highlighting both the strengths and risks of their products.

PD Peterka & Associates operates four distinct businesses under one roof, each with unique operational challenges and customer requirements. The company was using an outdated, homegrown system along with four other database and accounting applications that couldn't be integrated. This setup required each profit center to be managed separately, leading to inefficiencies. The primary challenges included managing materials flow, resourcing raw materials for short runs, ensuring on-time delivery, and maintaining quality at a competitive price. The company needed a single ERP solution that could handle the diverse needs of all four businesses, including robust Material Requirements Planning (MRP) capabilities and tight inventory control.

Unique Manufacturing faced the challenge of producing mission-critical parts for deep-sea oil production that had to be absolutely perfect and delivered on time. The parts they produce are essential for large drilling and pipeline operations, and any delay in delivery could result in significant financial losses. The company needed a way to manage scheduling and their production process to meet these critical deadlines and ensure flawless quality control.

Running a small to medium-sized machine shop business presents many challenges, including managing hundreds of customers while maintaining a tight, just-in-time operation. Alliance Broach & Tool, a company with over 35 years of experience, faced the challenge of growing their business in a tough economic climate. They needed to manage their operations efficiently to support their growth and maintain profitability. The company required a tool that could provide up-to-date information for quoting, costing, and managing projects as they moved through the operation. Additionally, they needed a solution that could help them manage their costs and improve their job planning, cost analysis, and floor operations.

This ongoing drive toward quality growth and the necessity to become Y2K compliant drove the company to seek a new ERP software solution in 1998. Suhor had been experiencing the problems common to a company using an evolving set of inflexible software programs. Moreover, each location was responsible for backing up its own data. Without a central repository, a location crash and lack of data back-up would result in a loss of the data. According to Jeanette Geiser, Suhor Treasurer, the company quickly realized that future profitable growth could only be accommodated by centralizing financial information and consolidating data for budgeting analyses and control purposes.

Floe International faced challenges in managing their production and inventory processes efficiently. The company needed to streamline its operations to reduce paperwork, data entry, and improve production flow. Additionally, they required a system that could support their Lean manufacturing environment and provide real-time data for better decision-making.

From 1,600+ auctioneers and dealers, Tractor Zoom receives data about each piece of equipment for sale. The data comes in many forms—from written descriptions to spreadsheets—and includes everything from make and model to engine hours. Different OEMs use different terms to refer to equipment parts, and these terms often contrast with the terms Tractor Zoom uses internally. Regardless of where the data comes from—or which terms are used— it all needs to be captured and cataloged in datasets for buyers and processed and standardized in a specific way. The Tractor Zoom team initially tried to do the work internally, putting in many hours behind computer screens to manually catalog data and pull in images and descriptions. As the company started to grow, its team quickly realized there was no way to keep up, says Matt Carstens, customer success manager. “We would’ve been hiring for six months to add at least 10 staff—or hiring people through a staffing agency that we still would’ve had to manage.”

The bank faced a significant challenge in processing a large volume of documents for a time-sensitive use case. Hand-labeling the data required for this task was estimated to take over a month, which was not feasible given the urgency of the situation. The bank needed a solution that could expedite the data labeling process and enable the rapid development of AI applications to classify and extract information from their documents.

Analysts at this top 3 US bank spend hundreds of hours a year manually reviewing financial documents to find information on interest rate swaps. This manual process is time-consuming and takes away from their ability to assist customers proactively. The team recognized the potential of using AI and NLP to streamline 10-K processing but lacked the training data required to train a model that could automatically identify and extract interest rate swaps from 10-Ks accurately across multiple formats.

Food companies face the challenge of achieving the right moisture and texture in puffed snacks to ensure customer satisfaction. The process of puffing rice involves complex physics, including mass, momentum, and energy transport, rapid water evaporation, material phase transition, pressure buildup, and plastic deformation. Companies need to optimize processing conditions to ensure consistent texture, flavor, moisture content, and food safety. The research team at Cornell University, led by Prof. Ashim Datta, aimed to model the dynamics and material behavior during the puffing of parboiled rice to address these challenges.

The performance and durability of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are heavily influenced by their operating temperature. Their performance decreases at low temperatures while the battery degrades quickly at high temperatures. This means that overall reliability is compromised, creating a potential safety issue. Industry research has led to standards regulating the ability of a battery to withstand fluctuations in temperature when it is in operation. In contrast, there has been much less focus on the temperatures that batteries are exposed to during the manufacturing process, which includes plasma pretreatment, UV curing, laser welding, ultrasonic joining, hot stacking, and hot gluing. A Li-ion battery may contain thousands of individual cells, which have to be stacked together. This is typically done through an assembling procedure that may involve various heat treatments, some of which can be extremely intense and expose the casing or other parts to high temperatures for short times. Gerd Liebig of NEXT ENERGY EWE Research Centre for Energy Technology at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, explained, “It is already well known that certain processes such as welding greatly increase the temperature within a battery. What is not known is the extent to which such elevated temperatures could propagate within and compromise a cell.”

OLEDs, despite their advantages, suffer from significant light loss and energy inefficiency. Researchers at Konica Minolta are working to address these issues by understanding and mitigating the complex plasmon coupling phenomenon, which accounts for 40% of the light lost in OLEDs. This phenomenon involves the interaction of light with surface plasmons at the interface between the cathode and the organic material, leading to energy dissipation as heat. The challenge is to find ways to reduce these losses and improve the overall efficiency and brightness of OLEDs.

Simulation consultants are using custom applications as an effective way to communicate their work to clients. Instead of delivering a static report, they can now deploy a product that contains the intricacy of an unabridged mathematical model, with the clarity and usability of an app. This lets clients run their simulations independently. At BE CAE & Test, we have created such an app to simulate a surface-mount device (SMD). Whether devices use or convert energy, they must properly manage heat so that they continue to operate in a designated temperature range. An SMD is an example of one electronic system that clients ask us to model. We make use of COMSOL Multiphysics® software to investigate these systems due to the wide range of physics that can be taken into account and the ease with which one can couple them.

Oil spills are urgent and unexpected events that cause significant damage to aquatic environments and marine life. Current methods for containing and recovering spilled oil, such as booms and skimmers, are often costly and only partially effective. These methods need to be deployed quickly to be effective, and even then, they often fail to recover most of the oil, which can sink to the sea floor. The collected oil-water mixture is often only partially usable, leading to further environmental concerns and wasted oil.

The development of a device meant to assist or completely replace the functioning of the heart is undeniably complex. This design process involves immense challenges, from supplying power to the device to ensuring it does not interfere with normal biological functioning. Researchers at St. Jude Medical use multiphysics simulation to engineer LVADs, Left Ventricular Assist Devices, in an ongoing effort to improve the outlook and quality of life of patients with heart failure. The condition typically begins with the left side of the heart, as the left ventricle is responsible for pumping oxygen-rich blood throughout the body, a greater distance than the right ventricle, which pumps blood through the lungs. Often, in patients with a poorly functioning left ventricle, an LVAD can provide mechanical circulatory support. The ventricle assist device is one of the most complex machines ever implanted in a human being. An LVAD must circulate the entire human blood stream and support life, as well as be compatible with the internal environment of the human body. Thoratec, now part of St. Jude Medical, brought LVADs to a wide market in 2010, after years of clinical trials.

Look at any industry today, from automotive design to consumer electronics, and you will find a common thread that binds them together: the demand for more innovative technology. The latest and greatest technologies are continuously surpassed by even more complex and intricate devices that offer advanced features and functionality. Numerical simulation tools are a viable solution to the challenge of creating more elaborate devices quickly, delivering results with real-world accuracy without the need for building prototypes for each design modification. Some organizations, however, may not have the resources to bring a simulation expert on board to help create and modify models. This is where simulation applications come in. These customized user interfaces are built around numerical simulations of physics-based systems and allow an end user to run multiphysics analyses set up for them by simulation specialists.

BLOCK Transformatoren-Elektronik faced increasing difficulty in designing inductors and transformers with aging simulation software. The company needed to reduce the number of prototypes created before finalizing a design to save costs and improve services. The challenge was to meet precise specifications concerning working frequencies, product sizes and weights, electrical power losses, electrical insulation, and varying environmental conditions. Additionally, the equipment needed to have product lifetimes of 30 years. The company sought a solution that would allow them to quickly and accurately improve designs while reducing the number of physical prototypes.

California-based LLNL oversees the National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world’s largest and most energetic laser. The giant machine—with 192 separate beams and 40,000 optics that focus, reflect, and guide those beams— can amplify emitted laser-pulse energy by as much as ten billion times and direct it towards a target about the size of a pencil eraser. The laser produces temperatures, pressures, and densities that are similar to those found in the cores of stars, supernovae, and large planets. Astrophysics and nuclear researchers use the giant laser to better understand the universe, utilizing such technologies as inertial confinement fusion (ICF), where hydrogen fuel is heated and compressed to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place. However, repeated use of this powerful laser can damage the optics within the system. “The optics can be quite expensive,” says Matthews. “The high-power laser light generated by the NIF can damage some of the fused silica optics, creating little pits in the surface—similar to the ding you get when a rock hits your car’s windshield. We do everything we can to repair and recycle the damaged ones.” An example of two damaged optic surfaces before and after repair is shown in Figure 1.

The modernization of the electrical grid to a 'smart grid' involves not only IT and embedded systems but also the critical 'nuts and bolts' components like transformers, cable joints, terminations, bushings, and fault current limiters (FCLs). These components are essential for the grid's reliability and efficiency. The challenge lies in engineering these parts to handle increased voltages and power ratings while minimizing size and cost. Additionally, the adoption of superconducting fault current limiters (SFCLs) faces technological and business hurdles, including the high cost of cooling and the complexity of integrating these devices into the grid.

The heating and cooling of buildings account for nearly 50 percent of energy consumption in Europe, prompting researchers to seek alternatives to conventional technologies. One promising solution is adsorption-based heating and cooling systems driven by heat rather than electricity. This technology can utilize heat from solar collectors, waste heat from industrial facilities, or combined heat and power units, significantly reducing electricity consumption and CO2 emissions. However, the development of these systems is complex due to their discontinuous operating cycles, varying peak energy fluxes, and the dynamic behavior determined by complex heat and mass transfer phenomena. To realize their full potential, the technology must become more efficient, compact, and cost-effective.

The challenge addressed by the Application Builder and COMSOL Server™ is the complexity and detail-oriented nature of traditional modeling tools. These tools often require significant expertise to operate, making it difficult for non-experts to interact with and utilize the models effectively. The need for a more intuitive and user-friendly interface that can present modeling results in real-time and be used in various scenarios such as lectures, demonstrations, and product simulations is evident. Additionally, there is a demand for a solution that allows models to be used as standalone applications or web resources, thereby broadening their accessibility and usability.

Rick Beyerle, a senior scientist at GrafTech's Advanced Energy Technologies (AET) subsidiary, identified a significant challenge in the sales process of their carbon and graphite products. The sales team needed to build trust with prospective customers, often requiring a 'proof of concept' to establish credibility. However, creating these proofs of concept was resource-intensive, requiring Rick and his team to divert R&D resources to modify and rerun validated models for each customer's specific configuration. The sales team, untrained in numerical modeling, found it difficult to navigate the complex models, which featured hundreds of parameters and boundary conditions. This situation led to inefficiencies and delays, as the application engineers were instructed to prioritize live tests over time-consuming simulations.