By iterating rapidly, engineers can discount less attractive ideas and innovate more. Engineers need to simulate not only early but also often to keep in step with the speed of design changes. During the design phase, speed is of the essence. Frontloading simply becomes a method by which trends are examined and less desirable design ideas are dismissed when the cost of change is lower. Frontloading is the process of pushing simulation earlier and earlier into the design cycle.ĭuring the design stage, engineering teams need a fast, easy-to-use, and accurate tool to help them understand the behaviors of the various design alternatives and possibilities early.

This year at the Simcenter Realize Live conferences we’ll be exploring the concept of “frontloaded simulation” as one of our key themes. Because those prototypes were expensive and only available late in the design process, opportunities for failure (and therefore innovation) were severy limited. In the good old days of engineering, this process of improvement through repeated failure was almost entirely dependent on the (sometimes destructive) testing of physical prototypes in a process that was often described as “design, build, test, repeat”. Often the lessons that are learned from early failures influence the whole future design direction of the project. Predicting which changes will improve a product, and which will diminish it, is the art of engineering we have to identify poorly performing design choices so that we can eliminate them. For every hard-won improvement in product performance, there is an almost infinite number of ways to break it. The problem is that for every successfully implemented design improvement, there are many more “failed iterations” that either delivered no improvement in product performance or somehow made it worse. Every successful product is the result of many design iterations, each of which gradually improves the performance of the product in some manner. Engineers take existing things and try to make them better, usually by making a series of incremental changes that are intended to make a product somehow “better”: faster stronger lighter more efficient less expensive. At its heart engineering is a process of continual improvement. Repeated controlled failureįailure is the very fabric of innovation, it’s what success is made of. Put simply, if failure is not an option, then neither is success. However, as an engineer, and as a middle-aged man, I respectfully disagree with him on the whole “failure is not an option” thing, because in my life, and my career, repeated failure is a necessary condition for eventual success. In real life, he is every bit as inspiring as his movie caricature.

I once had the pleasure of meeting Kranz at a conference and hearing him speak *. Gene Kranz is one of my heroes and the Apollo 13 story is one of the greatest stories of engineering triumphing over adversity.

Failure is not an option by gene kranz