Trilogy Acquires VulcanWorks
AUSTIN, Texas and DETROIT, June 24 -- Trilogy Software Inc., one of the largest privately held enterprise software and services companies, has acquired VulcanWorks, Inc., a privately held automotive engineering software company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Trilogy, whose major automotive customers include Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Nissan, offers solutions that help vehicle manufacturers derive improved value from their product development, forecasting and planning, order fulfillment, incentives management and retailing processes.
VulcanWorks specializes in high-performance software that cuts time and cost out of product development and engineering processes.
By integrating VulcanWork's capabilities into Trilogy's existing solutions, Trilogy can offer vehicle manufacturers a suite of solutions that deliver improvements across virtually every aspect of the "demand chain" -- from dealers and consumers back through product planning, engineering and manufacturing.
When implemented, the new Trilogy/VulcanWorks solution will reduce vehicle development time by as much as 25 percent and cut over $250 million out of the average vehicle's development cost, said Lee Sage, vice president and general manager of Trilogy's automotive group.
"This is significant improvement," said Sage. ""With over 40% of automotive engineers retiring in the next few years, more products than ever being developed and a laser-like focus on cost reduction at every OEM, the timing is ideal to invest in the type of technology VulcanWorks has been developing.
"VulcanWorks has demonstrated that significant portions of the analytical, planning and design work in the product development process can be highly automated. The capabilities enabled by their tools will create a dramatic shift in the industry for how vehicles are developed and designed."
VulcanWorks' founder, F. Gordon Willis, a former Ford engineering and computing executive with 23 years experience in the US and Europe, agrees.
"In spite of all the advances that have been made in software tools and changes in organizational structure to eliminate bottlenecks and silos, the industry has realized only marginal reductions in vehicle development time.
"A major reason for this is that we've been missing certain key technology links in the vehicle design and development chain that would allow further organizational and process transformation. With the integration of our companies' software solutions, vehicle manufacturers can now gain the process improvements they need to remain competitive in the world market."
The new, combined solution leapfrogs current technology in that it uses a rules-based approach to represent relationships between vehicle attributes, design parameters and detailed component or system design elements. This data can then be used by OEMs to quickly determine overall program feasibility, identify existing commodities and carryover systems that can be reused in a new vehicle, or to design a new part in a matter of days, not months.
If a new part is required, the software allows engineers to optimize the design early in the planning stage by performing "what-if" scenarios to quickly evaluate design alternatives and trade-offs in order to achieve the optimal balance between conflicting design objectives. This is simply not possible with typical software and this advanced "vetting" cuts down on the number of mistakes, prototypes, and associated tooling costs.
Once the desired design is finalized, the part can be automatically generated and tested with a direct linkage to existing CAD/CAE systems.
Ultimately, all of this means that many steps in the traditional 36-60 month product planning and development cycle can be either compressed or eliminated, while enabling much wider reuse of parts across platforms -- a major priority all OEMs have identified as a way to reduce cost.
The overall result is improved productivity, faster time-to-market, and a significant reduction in component or vehicle misbuilds, prototyping, waste and cost.
About Trilogy
Trilogy is one of the world's largest privately held enterprise software companies. Trilogy has invested over seven years of development in the creation of a set of automotive industry-specific solutions that are designed to meet the unique business, scale and performance requirements of the automotive OEMs. Trilogy provides the foundation to better manage the automotive demand chain (consumer - dealers - OEMs - suppliers) including retailing, order management, planning and global product data. This mature product set provides features addressing the requirements of the automotive industry and enables faster time-to-market. Trilogy's automotive solutions are delivering value for several major automotive brands including Ford, Jaguar, Lincoln Mercury, Volvo, Nissan, and Infiniti.
About F. Gordon Willis and VulcanWorks
Gordon Willis founded VulcanWorks in 1999 to develop software and services for systems engineering that dramatically reduce the time and cost of product development. He retired from Ford Motor Company in 1999 after 23 years' service, during which time he held a variety of positions in both computer systems and product engineering. From 1992 to 1999, these included chief engineer for automatic transmission engineering, chief engineer for vehicle engineering (Europe), and chief engineer for chassis. From 1989 to 1992, he was director of product and manufacturing systems, and prior to that held a variety of positions in powertrain control development and computer-based simulation of vehicle performance. Mr. Willis has a BSME and MSME from MIT, and an MBA in operations research from the University of Michigan.