AAM Sees Dramatic Productivity Gains

In this 2014 case study whitepaper, Bruce Jenkins of Ora Research interviewed the engineering team at AAM about their use of the simulation automation platform from Comet Solutions and the ROI they have measured.

American Axle & Manufacturing, Inc. (AAM) is a leading global Tier-One automotive supplier of driveline and drivetrain systems and related components for light trucks, SUVs, passenger cars, crossover vehicles and commercial vehicles. The company has a long history of successfully using FEA to master the many NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) challenges in any driveline engineering project – gear whine, gear rattle, shudder/moan/chatter, clunk, prop-shaft instability and others. Nevertheless, its traditional simulation methods had limitations.

Glen Steyer, AAM’s Executive Director of Product Engineering, reports major benefits from the new tool:

• Average 75% time reduction for each analysis iteration.
• Approximately $130,000 in annual cost savings at a single engineering site.
• Improved quality through globally enforced standards and practices which remove human error.
• Ability to run many more NVH analysis iterations, leading to more design decisions, earlier.
• Ability to redeploy resources as less experienced engineers are now able to safely run simulations.