Your Investment

Investing in Knowledge

No modern enterprise can survive and thrive without its information systems. Your financial data, customer records, inventory system: without them it would be difficult to compete effectively. You have invested in IT systems to ensure that the information critical to your business is accurate, secure and always available.

But does your organisation apply the same standards of knowledge management to the design and development of your products?

For any technology based enterprise, engineering and scientific excellence is a major factor in remaining competitive. Shortening the time to market, continuously improving quality and investing in product innovation are all ways of winning a competitive advantage. Your enterprise invests considerable sums in design, development and testing; and your continued profitability depends on maximising the return on this investment.

So it is essential to capture and manage the collective knowledge gained along the way to apply to future projects, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring a more productive – and ultimately more profitable – enterprise.

The Importance of Design

Conceptual design is at the heart of engineering and science based enterprises, the part of the development cycle that has the biggest impact on your competitiveness. Innovation in your products, systems and services is what differentiates you from your competitors. It requires the largest portion of your investment, and brings the greatest rewards.

Calculations big and small are the key component of most engineering designs and much scientific research too. The results of these calculations are part of the design, but the thinking behind them, the factors and constants used, the assumptions made, are often lost. Tracking and verifying calculations is expensive and error-prone (have you ever tried to locate an error in a cell of a large spreadsheet?); often it is impossible.

Careful management and documentation of the calculations and analyses that are at the heart of your design and development efforts can bring great rewards. Mathcad captures a key engineering knowledge asset for the first time, multiplying its value to the enterprise.

The Return on Your Investment

The engineers and scientists who work for your organisation are a valuable resource. They represent a substantial corporate investment.

With Mathcad, your engineers and R&D personnel can focus on the problem and its solution, rather than number-crunching and programming. Their time is used more efficiently, more productively. Compared to heavy-duty number-crunching software or programming tools, less time is spent in training and getting up to speed with Mathcad: it’s a much flatter learning curve. The work they do is documented and validated quicker, re-work is minimised, physical prototyping costs are reduced. Less time is spent re-inventing the wheel. This effective management of design calculations is the key to managing corporate knowledge.

Thanks to its very broad functionality, Mathcad meets the disparate needs of engineers within your organisation, so that the different components of a project are integrated and communicated. So time is saved, efficiency is greater, costs are lower.

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