Altair Partner Alliance Adds Lean Design Technology from Munro & Associates

Design Profit is now available for download by all eligible HyperWorks users

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May 22, 2013, 10:00 ET

TROY, Mich., May 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Altair Partner Alliance announced today that its offering now includes complexity management tool Design Profit, from Munro & Associates. Design Profit assists product design engineers by exposing waste and risk in their designs so they are able to make educated decisions to reduce design complexity and weight for downstream stakeholders.

Design Profit is applicable across industries including aerospace, automotive, marine, consumer goods, defense, industrial, and medical. It is most beneficial to companies that want to reduce waste and lower costs of developing and manufacturing products.

"Design Profit adds a comprehensive set of tools that are advantageous for designers striving to optimize their manufacturing processes," said David Foreman, Vice President of Munro & Associates. "Lean design is an emerging capability that offers vast benefits as far as cost savings and efficient product development to the end users, which will now include those who are members of the APA."

Starting out in Design for Manufacturability and Assembly (DFA/DFM), Design Profit uses symbols in a simple and methodical process to model a product or process. The model conveys design and manufacturing complexity in a visual and easy to understand format. Design Profit allows the user to see the big picture overview in terms of cost, time, quality, material, weight, investment, and ROI along with many other critical data points. Ultimately this allows designers to have a deeper understanding of the product's lifecycle design costs as a whole, both currently and in the future. Embedded images, videos, documents and notes also help illustrate and retain product information.

Quality Report Card, a module integrated within Design Profit, is able to identify and model root causes that affect costs, such as scrap, rework and warranty issues. These costs are rolled up into the cost of quality and allows companies to save valuable resources that otherwise could have been wasted. Quality Report Card automatically generates data-rich reports that are highly customizable and exportable. These reports include an executive summary for quick decision making, as well as Bills of Materials (BOMs), Bills of Process (BOPs), weight reports, distribution charts and process sheets.

"Munro & Associates have been at the forefront of the DFA/DFM process since the very beginning and Altair is excited to have them as part of the Altair Partner Alliance," said Timothy Smith, Director of Design Engineering at Altair. "The Design Profit software tool fits extremely well within an optimization-driven design process. Concept designs can be evaluated exceedingly early to ensure that only the most robust, cost effective designs pass on to the next phase of product development. We expect that product design engineers in a myriad of industries will find this tool beneficial in helping them develop better products, with an improved bottom line."

Design Profit provides a collaborative environment where a variety of departments can access the information to better understand design complexity and quality issues. This means that the engineering department can easily explain to manufacturing, finance, and other groups and suppliers their findings earlier in their design process to help minimize total life cycle costs. Design Profit brings cost accounting and accountability up front in the development process much like finite element analysis and other virtual engineering tools that are essential to product success.

Available for the last 12 years, Altair's innovative unit-based licensing system allows HyperWorks users customizable access to a growing portfolio of applications, optimizing their return on investment (ROI) by making more than 28 in-house developed applications available by use of a single pool of recyclable HyperWorks units (HWUs).

After experiencing this original licensing model's success, Altair has offered the opportunity for third-party companies to run their own applications under this unit-based system, a collaboration now known as the Altair Partner Alliance. The overall flexibility of these HWUs empowers users and allows them access to the largest and most complete suite of CAE applications available, making the benefits to participating HyperWorks customers infinite. The ROI increases for users each time a new application is added to the offering, since any of the partner programs can be accessed using the same leased HWUs they are already using to run HyperWorks. This makes more than 55 additional applications available at no incremental cost or long-term commitment.

HyperWorks users can download Design Profit at www.altairalliance.com/designprofit. To learn more about Design Profit, please attend one of the introductory webinars being held on June 12, 2013, at 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. EDT. These webinars will be hosted by Altair and presented by Munro & Associates.

Munro & Associates, Inc.

Since 1988 Munro & Associates has helped its customers save billions of dollars while generating tremendous increases in profits and market share. From the company that brought you DFM, Munro has developed DFM and DFA into a greater, more robust suite of tools and methods called Design Profit®.

Munro helps its customers design for profit at the source. A product's design determines most of a company's costs and rewards. Focusing on the design, Munro's customers realize tremendous increases in profits and market share. Design Profit ® calculates Life Cycle Costs, including the costs of Quality, and even computes a sigma number. Design trade-offs can be quickly analyzed to see the effects on "Total Accounted Costs." Munro's proven methodologies ultimately build business cases that guide their customers to the areas that show the highest returns on investment.

About Altair

Altair empowers client innovation and decision-making through technology that optimizes the analysis, management and visualization of business and engineering information. Privately held, with 1,800 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a

27-year track record for high-end software for engineering and computing, enterprise analytics solutions, and innovative product design and development, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com or www.simulatetoinnovate.com.

About the Altair Partner Alliance

Altair's HyperWorks platform applies a revolutionary subscription-based licensing model in which customers use floating licenses to access a broad suite of Altair-developed, as well as third-party, software applications on demand. The Altair Partner Alliance effectively extends the HyperWorks Platform from 28 internally developed solutions to more than 50 applications with the addition of new

partner applications. Customers can invoke these third-party applications at no incremental cost using their existing HyperWorks licenses. Customers benefit from unmatched flexibility and access, resulting in maximum software utilization, productivity and ROI. For more information about the Altair Partner Alliance, visit www.altairalliance.com.

SOURCE Altair