New Horizons

Ashley Hanson shares success stories from Lanner’s recent US conference

This month saw us host one of our most successful user events on record, the 2015 US WITNESS User Conference in Auburn Hills, MI. With over 40 attendees, Lanner’s COO, Andrew Aitken opened the event, highlighting the increasing value simulation has to play in what is a rapidly changing global economy, while our resident manufacturing guru, Oliver Bird talked about the role of simulation in delivering best practice across the manufacturing sector.

Echoing his insights, Hayward Tyler, one of our key manufacturing customers, stood up to share their experiences and strategy to establish a simulation-led culture across the entire organization, where every department engages with, and derives benefit from the software.

Long standing WITNESS user Joanne Berry from EnergySolutions was second to share her experiences, talking through business cases from her current work in the energy/nuclear industry. It spurred some interesting questions from the attendees about how Joanne and EnergySolutions cope with the unique challenges of working in such a highly regulated industry, and how WITNESS has helped to overcome some of these challenges.

The third guest speaker, another long standing WITNESS user, Phil Rohr of Timken, was pleased to provide hints and tips on how to better model in WITNESS and who spent a bit of time afterwards networking and sharing pointers with other power users in attendance.

Finally, the last guest presenter was David White of FreemanWhite, a healthcare design/consultancy firm. He provided a stellar case study on an emergency room optimization project he recently completed, which included outstanding visuals and a great story line.

Our theme, New Horizons, was incredibly apt, as the event represented a platform for delegates to discuss their future plans, both short and long term, along with associated obstacles, in a number of interactive workshops throughout the day. The sessions highlighted that typically, obstacles to fostering a more proactive, simulation-led organization included management buy-in; awareness across departments; time constraints and training.

However, the sessions also fostered a great deal of collaboration around ideas to overcome some of these obstacles, which led perfectly into the final session of the day on Lanner’s new enterprise technology platform, which represents an enabler for a more simulation-centric culture.

Everyone from the Lanner team, partners and customers left fired up and inspired to enhance the value of simulation within their company, a great testament to the many months of hard work which had been channeled into making it a success.

Now the dust is starting to settle, we’re still buzzing with some of the ideas, insights and suggestions from our customers on how we can enhance the value of simulation and elevate the benefits our customers are seeing through their respective projects even further.

We’d like to say a huge thank-you to all the speakers without whom it just wouldn’t have been the same – here’s to a successful 2016!