The Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) are responsible for holding the biggest industrial and systems engineering event of the year – the IIE Annual Conference. This year, the event was held in Montreal, Canada from June 1-3.

The SIMUL8 team was in attendance to network with the industrial engineering community and talk about what’s new at SIMUL8. This included running two very well attended vendor sessions, a lunch and learn, that included case studies and a demonstration of SIMUL8 2014, and a technical session, where attendees were shown how to build a simulation in one hour.

In addition to exhibiting we also attended some of the great presentations. We were impressed by the energy in the industrial engineering community, and the presence of aerospace industry professionals looking for new tools and talent to run their businesses.

The Montreal area is home to several aerospace and defense companies. One of the excellent keynotes was presented by Kevin Bartelson of Boeing Canada. Mr. Bartelson presented the work his industrial engineering team has done on a 150,000 square foot expansion of their facility to support the 777 and 737 MAX programs with their advanced composites manufacturing technology. Mr Bartelson recognized his IE team publicly during his talk, a nice touch given the audience. To see excerpts from Mr. Bartelson’s keynote, please click here and advance to about 3 minutes and 27 seconds into the video.

SIMUL8’s technical session also had an aerospace focus, demonstrating how SIMUL8 can be used for composites manufacturing. We had great questions from the audience, including attendees from Boeing and ATK. Composites manufacturing presents several challenges to the simulation modeler, not least of which is how to include the data for various part types, execute scenarios, and determine the best scheduling for critical resources like autoclaves. The SIMUL8 Jobs Matrix, Day Planner, and Resource Scheduler are all features that can reduce the time and effort required for modeling composites manufacturing, and these were demonstrated during the session.

We had so many great conversations during the conference, and learned a lot about what simulation is being used for in the industrial engineering community. One other interesting note is that many industrial engineers we spoke with still believe that simulation is difficult. When we demonstrate SIMUL8 to these engineers, they can see that we have done a lot of work in the SIMUL8 technology to reduce the level of difficulty (and time it takes) to build a simulation. You can see for yourself by arranging for an online demonstration.

Next year the IIE Annual Conference is in Nashville, May 30th – June 2nd