Altair gets award from Boeing

Company awards for suppliers are interesting because they highlight important relationships. The awards themselves are a great strategy for managing relationships. It’s often hard enough to manage internal relationships so programs and awards like this provide a framework for proactively working with suppliers.

Altair has won Boeing’s Performance Excellence Award for 2010. Boeing issues these awards to suppliers to have “achieved superior performance.” Altair says that they worked their way to the award with 12 Silver composite performance ratings for each month of 2010 from October 1, 2009 to September 30, 2010.

Acusim analysis of turbine
A simulation of a turbine blade as it turns created with Acusim software. The company was acquired by Altair in January 2011. This kind of specialized simulation isn't going into CAD packages any time soon.

Accepting the award, Altair CEO Robert Yancy said, “The Boeing Performance Excellence Award is an extremely important recognition to us in the aerospace supplier industry, and we will continue to strive to infuse the spirit and level of achievement that it symbolizes in all that we do to support Boeing.”

Altair’s HyperWorks suite of products includes analysis tools for minimum-weight design, stress analysis, and mechanism and vulnerability simulation for metallic and composite structures.  And in addition to Boeing, the company counts Airbus, BAE Systems, Bell Helicopter, Bombardier, Cessna, EADS, Eurocopter, GE Aircraft Engine, Goodrich, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon in its list of customers in the aeronautics industry. Altair products are also used in automotive, government & defense, consumer products, heavy equipment, life & earth sciences, and oil and gas exploration.

Significantly,  Altair will highlight their role in the aeronautics industry at their conference coming up June 22 in Orlando.

What do we think?

Admittedly, this is kind of a light story but it highlights the role Altair is playing at Boeing and in the aeronautics industry. As CAD suppliers bring in analysis tools and broaden the market for early analysis within design tools, CAE tools vendors are pushing the development of products into every more complex and specialized areas.

And, I really wanted to use that great image of a turbine simulation. – K.M.