Engineer's As Designers

Virtual Engineering leads a new trend of placing engineers over entire design projects

A trend is being led by Virtual Engineering, Plymouth MI, and it may change the way engineering and design firms conduct business. With so many in the automotive industry specializing in a specific area of expertise, Virtual engineers are asked to perform all functions required to complete a design project. Project management, CAD functions, complex surfacing, Finite Element Analysis (FEA), and some validation functions are performed by one individual on one program for customers.

Virtual is leading this trend after it was established as a contract product design and engineering firm four years ago by parent company Charlton Group Company. Charlton is a 20 year old sales and engineering company representing a variety of manufacturing firms. According to Steve Kennel, president of Virtual Engineering, the company's success has been due to the fact engineers are used as sales people. Because the sales engineers continued to become involved in technical issues, the company decided to enter the design business.

Originally plans were made to purchase an existing design firm in the Detroit area. However, Charlton discovered that existing contract design firms did not operate in the manner it preferred. Thus, Virtual Engineering was launched.

Virtual hires only degreed engineers in contrast to many design firms that utilize CAD operators who have anywhere from a high school degree to an associate degree to a four year degree. Approximately 90-95 percent of the company's business is automotive related, and regardless of technical training, specialization has evolved. In the automotive industry, because of the heavy concentration in body design, there have always been specialists who dealt with complex surfacing, says Kennel. This has penetrated all areas of design to the point where very few of the designers working on the board or on the tube are degreed engineers.

Virtual's engineers manage and perform actions from concept to release and detail drawings. While other industries already use this type of program management, Kennel says this is a radical change for the automotive industry. "Our engineers are qualified engineers and are the closest to the project-they understand what is going on."

Project management skills come with the package when the company hires new engineers. These skills are extremely critical in quoting, understanding customer requirements, and completing a project correctly and on time. A significant benefit to having one engineer perform all disciplines required in a design project is time savings. Typically a CAD operator will come to a point in a project where testing, FEA, and other work is required, and he has to submit a request for the service to the appropriate department or person. After waiting in line and after results are generated, the operator can continue with the project which has now been delayed by days or weeks. Virtual significantly reduces the program time by having the project engineer conduct each of the disciplines.

Another departure from the norm is Virtual's budgeting and quoting methodology. Every project is quoted as and based on a fixed cost basis. A single figure is usually quoted to a customer after the project details are determined and the overall scope is completely understood. This provides the company incentives to complete the project quickly, efficiently, and correctly the first time.

"Most of our engineers have been designing automotive components for 10-15 years, so they have a good handle on what it takes to design and develop a product."

Tier 1 suppliers are increasing internal engineering services, so why has Virtual's business grown into a $3 million company in just four years? Work flow is the major reason, says Tim Simonelli, sales engineer.

An overload of projects can cause an automotive supplier challenges in balancing budgets, employees, and scheduling. Virtual clients, such as Lear, JCI, TRW, and ASC, prefer to avoid hiring CAD operators during peak times only to lay them off during slower times.

Contracting with Virtual Engineering has enabled companies like these to meet customer demands and retain a steady work force.

Tier 1 companies are adding capabilities and services, but Tier 2 and 3 and smaller suppliers are also being asked by customers to perform design engineering. Kennel says, "It is very difficult for companies manufacturing smaller components and mechanisms to attract the kind of engineering talent they need to effectively service their customers. In addition, these Tier 2 and Tier 3 companies, in many cases, have expertise in manufacturing components and in R&D, but the actual design and development process is new to them."

Overhead and labor for design/engineering capabilities can be a tremendous burden for smaller companies. Utilizing Virtual allows these firms to allocate expenditures only when required for specific projects and frees them from having to support entire engineering staffs.

Responsiveness is another reason suppliers are contracting with Virtual. "We get involved in a lot of advanced programs and with our creative abilities, we can quickly turn around a project while the customer works on other aspects of the program," says Kennel. "As companies become larger and larger, their ability to be responsive becomes less and less. The ability to do things very fast is probably our biggest advantage."

It is interesting that most of Virtual's engineers had never worked on CAD before coming to the company. According to Simonelli, "They might not be the fastest on the tube, but because of their expertise to design things right the first time, overall they complete projects quicker."

Modern Metal Products, Rockville, IL, is an important customer of Virtual's, and their relationship is an example of why smaller, lower tier suppliers continue outsourcing design/engineering services. Modern had attempted for two years to establish its own engineering group and sales force in Detroit but without success. According to Kennel, Virtual's efforts have enabled Modern Metal to have a serious presence in Detroit and offer significant design and engineering capabilities. Business with Lear and JCI has been won, and the company's revenue continues to grow.


Interior components comprise a large percentage of Virtual's design efforts. Applications include arm rests, seat hinge systems, rear seat folding mechanisms, striker latches, door mechanisms, and head rest systems.

A project for Lear in England involved working on a rear reclining seat mechanism for Jaguar. This particular luxury vehicle team had incorporated a rear reclining seat that exhibited an interference problem because of the package shelf. To adjust the cushion so that the angle between the cushion and the seat back changes, Virtual designed a system that permits the bottom cushion to slide or articulate forward. An existing structural beam also presented an obstacle, therefore engineers designed the system so the bottom cushion would go up and over the beam via a cam action. The top of the rear seat back frame slides and pivots forward.

"We came up with the tubular frame concept used in this design and designed the entire structure," says Simonelli. "This seat required additional structure because the seat comes away from its original position and required additional load bearing characteristics. It becomes more like a front seat when reclined."

Solid modeling allowed Virtual engineers to help a customer resolve a problem that Virtual did not know existed. A seat adjuster was designed for packaging within an existing seat structure. An interference was discovered in the assembly, and the customer was notified. It was determined that the customer was already experiencing a binding problem because of the designed-in interference, and through the use of solid modeling techniques, Virtual was able to confirm and eliminate the problem.

A sport utility vehicle rear seat application is another project in which company engineers eliminated an interference problem. A head rest for the rear seat hit the back of the front seat when lowered. New designs created an automatically articulat- ing head rest that moves out of the way as the rear seat is folding down. Designing efforts were not complete at that point, because additional structural properties were incorporated to enable the head rest to withstand forces applied from objects slid in from the rear of the vehicle.

Virtual's expertise allowed it to facilitate the assembly process for another automaker. An existing seat latch system for a full size van did not have designed-in capabilities for handling inevitable variances in body builds. Seats could not be installed easily, or there was a chuck in the system because it was too loose. Virtual redesigned the latch so that it is capable of taking body tolerances.

Another example of the design firm's abilities involved a magnesium cushion frame for Lear. An analysis of the structure was performed to determine where material was required to sufficiently handle the loads. Two major challenges were met by Virtual. An almost identical frame to the previous stamped steel version had to be designed, because the magnesium frame was new, and the client wanted to revert back to the original version if necessary. Timing was the other challenge, but the project was completed satisfactorily. Kennel says, "By the time we had modeled the part to be able to do the analysis, it took us literally four weeks to finish the drawings."

Interiors represent the largest single area of Virtual Engineering's business, and it will probably be the largest growth area for the next few years. There are many challenges to designing, developing, and manufacturing interior components, but some of these provide the reasons suppliers use Virtual's capabilities. According to Kennel, interior-related design work is 95 percent packaging. Challenges involve the development of complex surfaces and fitting all the required elements in a limited area.

As more individual components give way to modular components and systems, these challenges grow. Virtual's experience and its use of PRO/Engineer (PRO/E) solid modeling software have allowed it to meet these challenges. "We are hoping and expecting that solids are going to play a big part in interior design, especially in instrument panels," adds Kennel. "This is where you have a lot of instruments you are trying to package in small areas, and there is a greater chance for interference." PRO/E solid modeling is a necessary tool when designing seating and seat structures. Floor pan and carpeting information is provided to design firms, and interference between the carpeting, floor pan, seat mechanisms, and seat structures have to be determined.

Attempting to make the link between the industrial designer or stylist and engineering is another major challenge in interior applications.

Traditionally, says Kennel, styling has been performed by building a clay model and picking data points from the surface and using this data to create a master. Virtual has been successful in taking data from a physical 3D clay model to a solid computer model. Efforts are being made to ensure that this process is conducted so that the information can be used in the design process. Kennel says that there is no reason this model could not be used to complete other design work such as some limited console projects on which the company has worked.

As Virtual moves into other areas of design, such as incorporating trim and conducting complex surface modeling, it will bring in additional engineers who have complex surfacing experience. This will enable Virtual to reach a significant goal: to design an entire system including trim materials and interact directly with styling people. Virtual Engineering predominately works on structural programs now.

Another challenge to automotive designers, whether interior related or not, is dealing with the various CAD platforms in the market. Car builders require suppliers to adopt a specific file type or use a translation package that converts data to the format used by the OEM. Data is lost in the translation sometimes causing severe headaches for many engineers. Even though IGES (International Graphics Exchange Standard) has created translation standards that reduce errors, software packages are updated so frequently, it is difficult for these standards to remain current, and they quickly become obsolete. Virtual's almost exclusive use of PRO/E minimizes these translation problems.

"Because Pro Engineer is a solids program and because the solid itself will not regenerate unless it is properly defined, you have a 100 percent accurate model," says Kennel. "In wire frames you can fake sections, but in solids there can be no faking." According to Kennel PRO/E translates more accurately than any other CAD system, and his company feels that this is the best solid modeling program available. In addition, Virtual does little work directly with OEMS, and the Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers are not as rigid in specifying CAD formats.

Contoured surfaces and highly integrated systems will continue to increase the complexity of designing interior components, but Virtual's unique approach seems to be engineering these challenges successfully.