What's Your Pawn Sacrifice or Fork Attack in the Manufacturing Chessboard?

Do you think of manufacturing as a game of chess? Rand Worldwide's technical product marketing Manager Krystian Link does. He sees the CFD and FEA experts, the designers, and the equipment in the shop as chess pieces, each with its own specialty, each abiding by its set of rules.

"A simulation engineer can do certain things well, comparable to a knight that moves in a certain direction. A rook moves differently. They're like program managers that can make big, impactful decisions, and have to be deployed differently. These pieces are always consistent, regardless of the product we make. Winning the game is launching the product right on time with quality, but how we get there changes every single time. I'll open the game differently, to see if I can do something better, more efficiently," he said.

Perhapas most important, the number of pieces are finite, so when a project is in jeapordy and the deadlines are in peril, you have to start thinking of the sacrifices you're willing to make or the fork attack you can launch.

"Larger, macro economic situations might force us to pivot your whole design portfolio, so you may have to delay a program or freeze it," he noted. "Sometimes you have to eliminate non-essential features -- quality-of-life features that might affect 5% of the users."

On the movement to ask designers to take on more simulation tasks, he compared it to swarming a queen with pawns. "I want to see if I can use a low-value piece to take out a queen or a rook, because that means I don't have to sacrifice a larger piece." But he also clarifies that, the designer-friendly simulation programs make the risk worthwhile. 

"You can use Ansys Fluent or Ansys Mechanical for the pre-launch validation work. But you can also use something like Ansys Discovery, meant for the conceptual phase, a low-risk portion of the product development," he said.

For more, listen to the full interview in the podcast. 

Rand's Krystian Link thinks of manufacturing as a game of chess. Image courtesy of Krystian Link.