Today's challenges, tomorrow's opportunities

Engineers' productivity becomes paramount as companies change and evolve their business strategies.

The pressure on engineers to do more work with fewer people has been a fact of life for Jon Lauckner since he joined General Motors as a test engineer in 1979. At that time, which now is almost ancient history in terms of how vehicles are developed, drafting boards and paper blueprints were still used in the world's engineering centers.

The transition to computer-aided design and engineering (CAD and CAE) tools was under way, but it would be years before they were truly integrated and effective. And all prototypes, regardless of their size and complexity, had to be built, tested, revised, and re-tested as actual physical objects before being approved for production-an extremely time-consuming and costly process.