Collaborative Design Made Easy with VOLTA

Everyone is well aware of the many online options when deciding how to share pictures or an article with our friends: social networks, shared drives, collaborative bookmarks, etc. But what if we also need to make sure that all comments are captured? And track the history of those comments in a structured and easy to search way? How can we decide which is the best tool? Ask the same questions to design departments that deal with huge amounts of data: simulation models, results, statistic datasets, bill of materials, testing data, just to name few categories. The answer becomes more challenging.

As engineering processes evolve in response to the increased complexity in product and system design, technology advances to incorporate new routines and promote best practices. Today’s design processes break the geographical and time zone barriers and ask for concurrent and synchronized contributions. Consequently, the focus of the technology dedicated to manage engineering workflows and Simulation Process and Data (SPDM) should be placed on interactions among people, data and workflows to become the most efficient, safe and traceable possible. And above all, always accessible from anywhere.

Centralized, virtualized environments enable the different players involved in the design process to access critical Intellectual Property (IP), work with models, analyze scenarios, their worries only being the internet connection.

Over the years, ESTECO has built fruitful relationships with its key customers to achieve an in-depth understanding of the governance of engineering workflows and procedures. Starting from modeFRONTIER, a well-established desktop solution for design optimization, integration and advanced data analysis, ESTECO technology has evolved in into a comprehensive environment for integrated management of simulation process and data – SOMO (Service Oriented Multidisciplinary Orchestration). This year ESTECO is moving a step further and renaming the next generation of its enterprise platform from SOMO to VOLTA. VOLTA incorporates the most modern web technologies with optimized UI and interactions, fostering simplicity and usability. This new release builds upon the company’s expertise in optimization and integration to support leading companies in their organizational transition toward more complete simulation-based product development. All of that while maintaining crucial capabilities such as efficient management of job execution and computational resources (HPC/cloud).

VOLTA incorporates the most modern web technologies with optimized UI and interactions, fostering simplicity and usability.

VOLTA acts as the engineering hub, where teams benefit from customizable data structures and fine-grained permissions to ensure efficiency for each role involved. Simulation experts can avoid the burden of managing “work in progress” data with the advanced version control system that traces, organizes and makes all kinds of simulation-related data accessible: from models to library files, methodologies, key-results and reports. VOLTA facilitates another – sometimes unstructured – key process: conveying experts’ skills and working experience into a codified and independent set of knowledge that is reusable. These simulation templates help access only the information that matters for the design task.

Often big OEMs approach the design of complex products by breaking them up in basic building blocks, creating physical predictive models and describing interactions and dependencies. With the new ESTECO environment, team leaders monitor the impact of changes on the system and gain a valid support for a faster decision-making, with secure data access. Ultimately VOLTA enables an effective simulation-driven product development, allowing non-technical, pivotal job functions to access and understand simulation and optimization data processes and to make better decisions.

For more information, please go to ESTECO.