What’s the most important feature of any simulation software package? Speed. What do we teach our developers on day 1 of joining SIMUL8 Corporation? Speed is King.

• Speed of build
• Speed of learning
• Speed of running
• Speed of experimenting

Why? Simulation is part of your decision making process, your decisions need to be agile so simulation has to be able to be part of that quick and responsive process. The whole point of simulation is to allow you to experiment and do “what if” runs. But if those runs take hours to execute, how many experiments are you going to try? If it takes you a month to build a simulation how often are you going to use it?

If simulation isn’t fast; fast to build, fast to run, fast to experiment then it stays reserved only for big decisions. At SIMUL8 our mission is to make simulation the heart of every decision, the small and the big, because any process decision can benefit from simulation. Just check out our case studies and you’ll see it come through in our users’ stories.  Yes, the bigger 6 month simulation projects worth 10s of millions of dollars are there, but there are also lots of small projects.  The best bit for me is that often the financial gains are just as impressive in the small as in the big projects.

So how fast are we? 

I’m proud to say we blow the competition out of the water on speed. In the last independent study completed SIMUL8 was 6 times faster than our nearest competitor.

With every release of SIMUL8 our engine gets optimized further, there is usually a speed gain of at least10% on each release. We also protect speed vehemently, every new feature that is added is bench marked against thousands of simulation models to make sure there is no degradation in speed performance. If there’s any drop in performance and the developer can’t fix it, the feature is removed. And yes they do cry when that happens!

Why should you care?

Before you pick your simulation tool, think about ROI, not of the software cost, but of your time. Your time should be King, so should your users. We build software for you, then you build decision tools for your users. Do you consider speed in your delivery? Have you minimized the experiment time for your user? Get your simulation solution used, make speed king, then you can be the hero of your organization because decisions made with simulation are always the best decisions.