CLOUD

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- MSC.Software Corp., the leading global provider of simulation software, services and systems, today announced that John Deere Welland Works of Welland, Ontario, Canada worked with MSC.Software's professional services team and used MSC.ADAMS to reduce development time for their rotary cutter systems by 2-3 years. John Deere's 15-foot and 20-foot Flex-Wing rotary cutters are used by farm operators, roadside maintenance companies and municipalities for turf and grass mowing, pasture clipping and clearing brush and stalks. "The integration of the ADAMS team has provided us with some very talented engineers and technologists, including a very dedicated and experienced group of professional services engineers," said Frank Perna, chairman and chief executive officer of MSC.Software. "This project with John Deere is an excellent example of how companies outside of the automotive and aerospace industries are relying on outside vendors and virtual product development tools to guide product development and are seeing significant ROI on their investments. To help a company reduce their development time by years is truly an amazing accomplishment and we're proud to have played a part in that." "In the past, we had to keep building new prototypes and testing them until we were satisfied with their life. The problem was that prototypes are very expensive and take a long time to build and test," said Terry Ewanochko, product engineer for John Deere Welland Works. "Using this new method, we have reduced the number of physical prototypes from three or four preciously down to two and now down to one or two on our most recent designs. These time savings made a big contribution to the dramatic reductions in the development cycle on our latest products." For the heavy-duty work of clearing brush or mowing turf or grass, John Deere's rotary cutters must be extremely durable. By utilizing MSC.ADAMS/Durability integrated into the Pro/ENGINEER CAD environment, engineers at John Deere were able to develop a full virtual prototype of the rotary cutter and perform various types of analysis including durability, finite element analysis (FEA), multi-body simulation and fatigue life prediction. By performing these analyses, John Deere was able to have more confidence in their designs and better predict the service life of the cutters without having to build costly prototypes.