Now Safety Managers Can Streamline, Accelerate, and Improve Automotive Safety Activities with a Single Tool

Ansys Digital Safety Manager is a new way to digitize safety analysis and engineering from development to deployment to operation

Faulty airbag deployments, unintended accelerations, and vehicle fires — over the years, all of these safety-related incidents have cost companies millions.  The trick for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Tier suppliers, of course, is mitigating risk up front to prevent these incidents from happening at all.

When something goes wrong, the safety manager is probably one of the first individuals to hear about it as they are the first line of defense. Safety managers are tasked with asking all of the tough questions before a product can be released, including what the safety concepts are around a specific product and whether all of the necessary activity has been done to support those concepts.

Ansys Digital Safety Manager drives safety process optimization, acting as a central hub for gathering data, managing resources, planning, and automating many process steps to deliver a comprehensive view on safety.

With Vehicle Safety Comes Great Responsibility 

Of all of the priorities OEMs face, safety remains at the top of the list. Of all of the stakeholders involved, it is the safety manager who owns a lion’s share of the safety validation process, including system failures and cyber attacks. This is not surprising, as safety managers are responsible for sign-off on a product release only after a product is considered sufficiently safe. The pressure to succeed is immense.

Thankfully Digital Safety Manager is now available to streamline, accelerate, and improve the accuracy of all safety activities to help ensure success. It’s a new solution for safety analysis and engineering that digitalizes safety management — from development, to deployment, to operation.

Digital Safety Manager is a dedicated solution for addressing specific pain points for safety managers in an intuitive digital environment during every phase of product development — from the initial design phase through safety validation and verification. The tool helps them tackle their daily work by automating and managing safety cases throughout the entire product development flow. Digital Safety Manager streamlines their ability to oversee and track the progress of an entire project, task by task — giving them a single perspective on safety that extends beyond the project level.

Reliability is No Accident Thanks to Digital Safety Manager

Today many automotive companies are still using spreadsheets, requiring a safety manager to manually input and flag numbers every week to send to a manager for consideration. All of these spreadsheets will then be manually input into one big report. It’s not just the process that’s a pain, it’s the potential for errors that comes along with it.

Because it’s an open platform, Digital Safety Manager can be used with other tools, including Ansys medini analyze for traceability all along the development chain. Data integration relies on a simple approach to linking files from other software — including medini analyze — into Digital Safety Manager to extract whatever information is needed, then accurately represent it in a single, shareable report.

The tool also supports seamless integration with medini analyze, which presents definite advantages. Specifically, users can:

• Plan, coordinate, and document all phases of the safety lifecycle using model-based safety planning support to implement ISO 26262.
• Keep track of all safety projects within a product line or other contexts. Users can deliver a project overview and key performance indicators, plus safety project validation to identify impediments early in the development cycle.
• Monitor work products on the way to making a final safety case with the help of an integrated feature set to link and document work product results, and argue their maturity.

Seamless Support of all Autonomous Vehicle Applications Within One Convenient Tool

Finally, Digital Safety Manager can be especially helpful in supporting autonomous vehicle (AV) applications, as they involve aspects of electrification and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) that can be huge pain points for OEMs, safety wise. All of a safety manager’s activities around AVs can be supported by this new tool to plan and control the process, whether it’s automating specific verification and validation steps or soliciting information via the tool in support of these types of activities for end-to-end traceability. 

Learn more about how Ansys Digital Safety Manager and Ansys medini analyze can help you with your auotmotive safety.