Development of open source evaluation criteria software for selection of simulation tools used by automobile manufacturers in North India

Abstract

In today’s turbulent economy and brutal global markets, manufacturing companies are doing all they can to maintain their competitive edge. Products must stand apart from others, breaking new ground in performance, size, shape, capacity, durability, value or other attributes that compel consumers to select one product over another from a store shelf. In a world economy of radical change, product innovation has emerged as a key market differentiator across nearly all manufacturing industries and market sectors including automobile, aerospace, telecommunications, industrial machines, business equipment, discrete parts, and consumer products. Many organizations have to implement change management approach in order to survive in competitive business environments. Examples of such approaches include Total Quality Management (TQM), Just in Time (JIT), Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), Process Innovation (PI) and Knowledge Management (KM). Modelling and simulation are emerging as key technologies to support manufacturing in the 21st century as simulation is a powerful tool for allowing designers to imagine new systems and enabling them to quantify and observe its behaviour. According to Hammer and Champy (1993), any change brings substantial risk as it is usually difficult to predict the outcome of changes before they are put into practice, and it is evident that the failure rates of Business Process Reengineering projects is over 50%. Successful implementation of BPR is not possible without the use of Business Process Modelling (BPM) and that too through simulation as it seems reasonable to claim that simulation modelling could offer a great potential in modelling and analyzing business processes, and therefore reduce the risk associated with business process change. Increased interest in simulation has, in turn, led to an explosion in the number of simulation software with a strong orientation toward manufacturing problems. There are hundreds of simulation software in the market, with new and upgraded products being produced all the time. The task of simulation software evaluation and selection, which is a multi-criteria decision making type, is usually time consuming. As a result, a company trying to select simulation software for the organization or for a particular application is now faced with a bewildering variety of choices in terms of technical capabilities, ease of use and cost. Automobile industry is one of the largest manufacturing industries today making extensive use of number of simulation software. It is using simulation for sheet metal forming, die casting, forging, mould flow simulation, vibration analysis, structural analysis, thermal analysis, crash analysis etc. Categorically, automobile industry was selected in this domain-specific study. It has been also observed that, in spite of the increased scholarly interest in the business process simulation and business process simulation tools, relatively little empirical attention has been given to the evaluation and selection of simulation software in India.