Build, test review, and improve

SAE 100 Future Look: Frank Perna, Chairman and CEo of MSC. Software writes about his experience in vehicle engineering, testing, and management positions.

It is truly amazing to consider how much product design and development has changed in the last decades. I spent 17 years at General Motors in a variety of vehicle engineering, testing, and management positions, and while many things have changed thanks to the pervasiveness of computer technology, the fundamentals have remained the same. To build the best vehicle possible and do so within strict cost, time, and resource constraints, you follow four very basic steps: build, test, review, and improve.

The difference between following those steps today and following those steps when I was testing cars in the 1960s is that today, thanks to computer technology, engineers can perform extremely sophisticated virtual tests in much less time and for much less cost than if they performed the corresponding physical tests. Not only that, the data generated by the virtual test is not limited to the number of sensors put on a vehicle; the data in a single computer model can be sliced and diced to wield an enormous amount of valuable design and performance information.