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Increasing Engineering Productivity through Smart Deployment of Simulation: A Case Study on Oticon
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Digital Twin / Simulation
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Device Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Electronics
- Equipment & Machinery
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Manufacturing Process Simulation
- Virtual Training
Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
The global hearing aid market is becoming increasingly competitive due to an aging population and higher life expectancy. In this environment, medical device manufacturers need to bring advanced products to market quickly and without incurring additional costs late in the development cycle. However, many companies deploy their engineering resources late in the development process to address design and manufacturing problems prior to product rollout. This approach often results in vital engineering resources being used to fix design problems rather than designing products that better meet customer needs and critical design requirements the first time. Oticon, a manufacturer of hearing aids, realized the value of engineering simulation and used it to design and validate key components of its devices. However, to become a global leader in innovation and stay ahead of the competition, Oticon needed to apply simulation to all the components interacting in the product, requiring a scalable, systems-level approach to design.
About The Customer
Oticon is a business unit of the William Demant company that manufactures hearing aids. The company recognized the value of engineering simulation and used it to design and validate key components of its devices. However, to become a true global leader in innovation and stay ahead of the competition, Oticon realized it needed to apply simulation not just to key parts of the hearing aid, but to all the components interacting in the product. This required a scalable, systems-level approach to design with senior management buy-in to re-allocate engineering resources and a customized simulation workflow.
The Solution
Oticon leveraged the ANSYS® Application Customization Toolkit (ACT), a development tool that uses a common language to configure and customize the simulation user interface, simulation workflow, and solver extensions. This allowed Oticon to scale its product development process across the engineering staff and efficiently design the entire hearing aid system virtually. The implementation involved three steps: gaining executive support for the systematic deployment of simulation in the early stages of the design process, customizing the workflow to increase CAE accessibility to design engineers with little to no formal CAE training or experience, and validating a computer model that accurately predicts the performance of the entire hearing aid system. Oticon's CAE experts developed advanced computer-based models of critical hearing aid components, which were extensively authenticated and became an accepted tool for validating designs prior to the final prototyping/testing phase of the product development process.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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