Ensuring a return on your investment

18 February 2011

Investing in core engineering software is a critical decision, so we've put together an article on the Adept Scientific website to show how Mathcad will provide your organisation with a positive return. Conceptual design is at the heart of engineering based enterprises, the part of the development cycle that has the biggest impact on your competitiveness and your long-term success.

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.

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.

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 – and the key to ensuring a real and lasting return on your investment in the software.

Find out more here.