This is a truly exciting selection for MTS, said Sidney W. Emery, Jr., chairman and CEO. It puts the customer’s stamp of approval on our strategy to provide tightly integrated tools to accelerate the design validation process. We were chosen for our strength in understanding the customer’s internal processes, as well as our ability to bring world class innovation across both hardware and software methodologies. This is the first time that a company outside of the OEM’s themselves has been tasked to put these disciplines together in the design validation space. It’s gratifying that MTS was the preferred partner to lead this integration. It’s also the first time that a large single MTS order included significantly more software and analytical tools than physical testing hardware. We’re convinced that MTS and our SmartSim Community members together have unparalleled capabilities to reduce customer costs and to speed their new automotive products to market, thus creating new growth opportunities for all the partners.
MTS software and services for Noise and Vibration testing and analysis are a significant part of the order. It also includes Component Empirical Dynamic Models (EDM(TM)), Virtual Test Lab software and new RPC(R) Pro durability testing software. Software products from our SmartSim Community members – nCode International Ltd, providing industry leading durability software, and Mechanical Dynamics (Nasdaq: MDII), developers of the ADAMS(R) suite of functional virtual prototyping solutions – are also major contributors to the order. With this purchase the customer will receive advanced modeling and development tools and services that complement MTS’s full vehicle test systems and component test systems installed as well as planned.
Additionally, the customer ordered physical testing hardware for both durability and performance attributes. Under the control of RPC Pro, output resulting from the use of this hardware will be directly connected to virtual software models for precise evaluation and correlation. Altogether the customer expects to substantially reduce the time it takes to perform these tasks today with much more accuracy throughout.
