Michigan Simulation User Group

This great Friday Tip will show you how to easily find where your particular resource has been assigned, it’s really useful for when you have a complex simulation.

Once your resource is on the screen if you hold the left mouse button down when over a resource icon, you will highlight all of the Work Centers in your simulation to which that particular resource has been assigned.

Plus, you can use the ‘FIND’ function in the advanced options for any resource in order to display a list of all of the locations within your simulation where that resource may be utilized.

Watch this video to see how to do it.

We hope you find this tip useful!

There are few cities as exciting as Las Vegas. With the bright lights, luxurious hotels and 5 star restaurants, there really is something for everyone. Now, before any rumors start, we’re going for business not pleasure, but we know we’ll enjoy ourselves at this year’s  Society for Health Systems (SHS) Conference that’s going to be held at The Mirage Hotel from Feb 18-20.

This event will focus on the best ways to improve processes in healthcare systems. As you already know, at SIMUL8 Corporation we pride ourselves on producing world renowned dynamic, innovative simulation software that improves processes, so attending this conference is a great opportunity to showcase our work. Plus, our very own Claire Cordeaux and Fiona Lindsay will be presenting a poster on ‘making simulation easy to use’ in the Exhibit Hall.

With SIMUL8’s aim to improve software and simulation development to overcome barriers for use in healthcare, our poster describes the methods we have developed to try and bridge the gap. The topic chosen for this year’s poster is heavily aligned with both our aim, and the aim of SHS; to tackle healthcare industry problems and advance healthcare systems.

Improving healthcare means identifying trade-offs between resource utilization, waiting times, operating costs and the quality of care. This year’s conference gives us the opportunity to explore and share best practices in quality, productivity and efficiency for healthcare industry decision makers.

So while everyone else may be gambling their savings away in Vegas we get to show how discrete event simulation allows healthcare administrators to experiment with solutions without putting patients at risk and can manage more complexity than the traditionally used spreadsheet analysis. Who’s the winner now?

If you read our blog you’ll already know about our great new product, SIMUL8 Basic. Basic is ideal for those looking to improve processes and reduce costs with simple and easy to get started software. SIMUL8 Basic was designed to guide users through building simulations easily, meaning users can get started in minutes.

Now, since the launch of our new product we’ve had a few questions from our Standard users and we’d like to take the opportunity to answer your most frequently asked question here, on our blog.

If you’re currently a SIMUL8 Standard customer, don’t worry, you’ll still be supported in the near future, and if you’re on an annual maintenance plan you’ll continue to receive upgrades.

Because we love our customers so much, and we want to keep everyone in the loop, we have a dedicated FAQ page on our website. If you want to know more our FAQ’s provide answers on what SIMUL8 Basic means for you. If there’s something we’ve missed, please let us know.

Oh and there’s more, yep we are that good! If you’re a Standard customer and would like to upgrade to SIMUL8 Professional to add a completely new dimension to your simulation modeling, we are currently offering all Standard customers the option to upgrade for a special discounted price of $1,995 (normally $3,995). Don’t say we’re not good to you!

Yes, we’ve said it before but we’ll say it again; the SIMUL8 support team are dedicated to continuously improving our software. Need proof? Well even between new releases, we regularly offer free service packs for the latest version of our software. Now, you may be wondering, what’s a service pack?

Service packs include all kinds of exciting new features. For example, the latest service pack lets you open your run time results charts straight from the ribbon rather than the old way of having to go through the results dialog. Let us know if there are any other features you’d like to see directly on the ribbon for easy access and we’ll add it to a future service pack for you.

Don’t miss out on these new features and subscribe to our notification service and receive an update that a new service pack is released.

To check which build you are on now, open SIMUL8 and go to the Help/About menu. The latest build is 2484. If you are on an earlier version it’s definitely worthwhile updating your software here by following the instructions. Remember to check the box to receive a notification when a new service pack is released!

Did you know that when creating a label you can write a ‘Memo’ that will link to that label and display a text description when that label is hovered over in a contents list? This is really handy for remembering what different label value represents or when handing a simulation over to colleagues.

Check out this step by step guide on how to do it!

1. .Go to ‘Actions’ to create your ‘Label

2. Enter your label name

3. Click ‘Memo’ and type a description of your label

4. Once you’ve created your simulation, and you want to check the contents of your storage bin, and what work items are in it click on ‘Contents’ on the advanced tab of your storage bin.

5. When you view the contents of your storage bin, you can hover over item of the storage bin to view your memo.

At the beginning of the year, most people start their diets, hit the gym and pledge to stick to their new year’s resolutions. At SIMUL8 we’ve made some changes of our own, which don’t involve limiting yourself. As you may already know, every year we improve our software to give our customers the very best, but before SIMUL8 2011 changes we’re going back to basics.

With that said, we’d like to introduce SIMUL8 Basic; the simplest simulation tool on the market.

SIMUL8 Basic is ideal for those looking to improve processes and reduce costs with simple and easy to get started software. SIMUL8 Basic guides you through building your simulation, meaning you can get started in minutes. No experience is required, so you can get the answers you need right away!

What brought upon this change you ask? Well, I guess it’s best to start at the beginning; in 1994 SIMUL8 revolutionized the market by transforming simulation from a technically complex task to something that could be used by people from any skill set.

So, keeping the beginner user in mind our team developed SIMUL8 Basic to let anyone get started, even if you have no previous knowledge of simulation.

That’s not to say that our other software isn’t easy to use, but SIMUL8 Basic offers all the features you need to get started. At SIMUL8, our goal is to make the benefits of simulation supported decision making accessible to mainstream computer users, and that begins with SIMUL8 Basic.

The paddle helps you to quickly build a simulation.

To access the paddle simply drag a Work Entry Point, Storage Bin or Work Center onto the screen. Providing the paddle is enabled you will notice four blue triangles around the item you placed on screen. Clicking on an arrow will open the paddle in that direction, inside the paddle icons.

In order to turn your paddle on, click FILE, then PREFERENCES, OPTIONS and from there you will see a table with paddle options, simple check the ON box to turn it on.

Once you’ve done that, clicking an icon will add a new item (Work Entry Point, Storage Bin (queue) or Work Center – depending on the icon you click) in the direction you have selected. By default items will be linked together and the paddle will jump to the newly added item. The image below illustrates this flow.

Certain behavior of this feature can be modified from the simulation windows right click menu.

On: Allows the paddle to be turned off and on.

Link Items: This setting determines whether new items will be linked the parent (paddle) item using routing arrows. If switched off, imagine the step 3 of the above image with no arrow linking the two items.

Open New Items Paddle: This setting determines if the paddle will jump to the newly added item, illustrated in the above image. When switched off the paddle will remain open on the original item.

Holding the CTRL key while clicking will toggle your current ‘Open New Items Paddle’ setting, this allows you to quickly change new item creation modes without the need of going into a menu.

SIMUL8 has many keyboard shortcuts that can save you a lot of time. This week our Friday tip is a collection of keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to access the lists in your simulation quickly.

This is really great if you need to see certain list items at a glance. From these lists you can also access each item to make changes.

If you have any other shortcuts you use all the time – comment and let us know and we’ll include them in a future Friday tip.

December has been a busy month, we’ve just come back from our Automotive Users Group in Michigan and now we’re in the sunnier location of Phoenix, Arizona for Wintersim 2011.

The Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) is the premier international forum for discussing the latest developments and research in simulation.

In addition to the technical program WSC also gives simulation practitioners, researchers, and vendors working in all disciplines in industry, service, and academic sectors the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas. The theme for WSC 2011 is “Simulation for a Sustainable World.”

We’ve had a lot happening during the conference, with an evening session and two talks on the applications of simulation.

Details of both these talks are below, so if you didn’t have a chance to catch up at Wintersim, or would like more info on either of these then contact me and I’ll be happy to give you more info.

SIMUL8 has its Head in the Cloud

SIMUL8 was created to make simulation accessible to all and we’re continuing that mission by taking simulation to the cloud.

During our presentation we gave attendees the opportunity to find out about the latest developments in SIMUL8 2011 and how cloud technology can help them make better decisions.

Making Simulation Accessible to Healthcare Users

Our Healthcare team have developed Healthcare specific products aimed at answering important questions in Healthcare.

During the session we discussed the tools that we’ve created to make healthcare simulation accessible and discussed how to engage healthcare audiences using simulation.

In a recent report by Richard Humphries for The King’s Fund- a charity that seeks to understand how the health system in England can be improved- it was highlighted that “well coordinated health and social care can produce better outcomes, improve experience of using services, and make limited services go further”. With that said, that’s why our cutting edge work in health and  human service integration with the NHS Gloucestershire and Gloucestershire County Council in the UK has been so exciting.

What was even more exciting was the response from the Joint Executives! We’ll get to that later though, first let’s see how everything came together.

Gloucestershire NHS built their own simulation to understand how patients and service users flow between health and human services, and to test the potential impacts of integrated solutions, such as increased reablement and a single point of access.

Using Scenario Generator, a simulation tool designed by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement with SIMUL8 Corporation-which includes both health and human service pathways-Gloucestershire built a simulation, driven by their population and disease and human service prevalence.

The simulation was validated by data from the NHS and the County Council, and run to see the impact on costs if health and human service continued to deliver services as they are today in 5 years time. These results were compared with what would happen if reablement were increased or a single point of access implemented.

Gloucestershire also built a visual display to help explain to the two organisations and their stakeholders, how the system worked and what the changes would mean.

The feedback from the Joint Executives who viewed the results was that:

“This is the most exciting project we have seen to help with our strategic planning”.

The team working on this project agreed that they had learned a huge amount about how the two systems interacted, and are now working on a series of change scenarios to test their implications prior to implementation.

As a result of the Gloucestershire project, SIMUL8 Corporation have seen an increase in interest from local government in using simulation to test the implications of change programmes, and several health and human service teams working together on projects using Scenario Generator. This comes at at time when the necessity of integrated care is at its peak; “Innovation such as integrated care is necessary, particularly in this time of economic austerity, as nations and localities search for effective responses to the needs and demands of an ageing population”

Yesterday, along with PMC, we hosted an exclusive event in Livonia, Michigan for major automotive users. Speaking at the event were representatives from GM, Ford and Chrysler, all sharing a common use of SIMUL8 simulation software to maximize their production throughputs and efficiencies.

“Between SIMUL8 Corporation and PMC, we share a passion for improving peoples’ processes. Automakers are at the leading edge of simulation use, and today was a great chance to bring them all together and put the wheels in motion for a forward thinking community. Our objective was to get them to share their ideas – each offering something unique to the other. While these guys are ahead of the game, we have only just scratched the surface of simulation in the automotive world. By creating an automotive community of simulatio

n users we can help each other produce far more vehicles, in a better way, than on our own”

The event  saw suppliers to the ’Big 3’ in attendance. Meanwhile,  users from India and China were able to hear about work from their colleagues in North America by video conference.

It was a very exciting day for networking, exchanging ideas and sharing learning points. We also had the chance to showcase some of the latest features,  techniques and technologies now available with SIMUL8.

Plans are already in place to repeat the event next year, with the community likely to grow as the need for fast, efficient, error free production increases!

Yesterday, along with PMC, we hosted an exclusive event in Livonia, Michigan for major automotive users. Speaking at the event were representatives from GM, Ford and Chrysler, all sharing a common use of SIMUL8 simulation software to maximize their production throughputs and efficiencies.

After the event Kenny, our Automotive Account Manager said:

“Between SIMUL8 Corporation and PMC, we share a passion for improving peoples’ processes. Automakers are at the leading edge of simulation use, and today was a great chance to bring them all together and put the wheels in motion for a forward thinking community. Our objective was to get them to share their ideas – each offering something unique to the other. While these guys are ahead of the game, we have only just scratched the surface of simulation in the automotive world. By creating an automotive community of simulation users we can help each other produce far more vehicles, in a better way, than on our own”

The event  saw suppliers to the ’Big 3’ in attendance. Meanwhile,  users from India and China were able to hear about work from their colleagues in North America by video conference.

It was a very exciting day for networking, exchanging ideas and sharing learning points. We also had the chance to showcase some of the latest features,  techniques and technologies now available with SIMUL8.

Plans are already in place to repeat the event next year, with the community likely to grow as the need for fast, efficient, error free production increases!

High demand in China’s automobile market has meant more plants need to increase their throughput. Therefore, with General Motors being a global organization, Shanghai GM needs to meet the demands of not only China but internationally.

Meeting international demand presented an obstacle as each geographical market differed, meaning each vehicle model had a unique design.

In order to improve throughput and meet demand, Shanghai GM needed to add new technology and distribution models for each vehicle.

Their goal, therefore, was to meet demand and improve throughput without increasing overheads.

Shanghai GM created a simulation of the complex conveyor system using SIMUL8 software to test ideas, and increase throughput. Ideas were tested in SIMUL8 to simulate the real situation and check the feasibility of various scenarios.

When Shanghai GM needed to modify an old conveyor system to meet higher demand, they used simulation to see where bottlenecks built up at certain parts of the system.

This allowed GM to experiment with different scenarios to remove the bottlenecks at the lowest possible cost. At the evaluation stage when the determination of whether an old conveyor system met a new demand, the system was diagnosed to find a root cause as to why it was unable to meet a new demand.

Shanghai GM not only reached their goal but surpassed it with:

• increased throughput with no cost increase
• removal of bottlenecks and savings on excess costs
• improved maintenance resource utilization and,
• greater understanding of processes

The creation of simulations in SIMUL8 also enabled a comprehensive comparison of the original conveyor layout to get the best results. Perhaps, best of all GM Shanghai found that SIMUL8 is not only an analysis tool, but also a way to communicate with customers and help the decision making process.

A couple of weeks ago, we attended  the Scottish Assisted Living Program Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. This particular program is doing a great job of promoting the development and implementation of new telehealthcare technology as routine practice in Scotland.

We were there among some big international names such as O2, Vodafone and Philips – who have invented some really cool products in the assisted living sector. They use wireless or bluetooth technology to send alerts from medical devices to your TV – as a quick reminder that you may have left the oven on too long, for example.

They also have a social-network based user interface which allows the user (or their family) to create a profile of next of kin details, including photos and contact details so that medical or social work personnel know straight away who to contact in an emergency.

The fact that this program exists, and that such big names are becoming more involved in this area, shows that there is real interest in the area of assisted living and keeping people at home as long as possible. It’s pretty exciting working in a relatively new and growing area and seeing work that helps improve lives of the elderly population. Especially when one of our SIMUL8ers, Emma, had her first small project,-which she completed around 6 months ago-be the highlight of  their pitch!

After the 3 minute pitch explaining the benefits of evidencing the best practice for implementation and using simulation to answer any stakeholder’s doubts, there was a crowd of people gathered at the SIMUL8 stand! Emma demonstrated the Telecare pathway, which is based on Scenario Generator and Sarah helped by demonstrating some of the other healthcare models such as the outpatient clinic and emergency department.

All in all it was a very successful day!

With winter temperatures and the holiday season looming, the Winter Simulation Conference couldn’t come at a better time!

This year’s conference is being held in sunny Phoenix, Arizona from December 11th through the 14th.

Which means you can meet simulation practitioners, researchers, and vendors, plus stay warm AND you don’t have to think about Christmas shopping. It’s a win-win situation. Wait, it gets even better. SIMUL8 Corporation will be there!

Wintersim will take place at the stunning Arizona Grand Resort, and the SIMUL8 team is really excited.

We don’t want to give too much away but here’s what we have planned: We’ll be at booths 31&32 in the Arizona Grand Ballroom and we welcome you to come visit us and learn how you can improve your processes and make better decisions! That’s not all, we’ll also be hosting a SIMUL8 Group Session with our partner Visual8 on Tuesday, December 13th from 6:30-8:30pm in Palm 3C, on level 3.

We will be discussing simulation processes and how to get the most from SIMUL8. Please come prepared with questions, as we’ll have a question and answer session.

Hope to see you there!

Want to be able to pan and zoom around your simulation easily? No problem, by using The Overview Window you can do just that.

The Overview Window is available from the view tools on the status bar (located at the bottom right hand corner).

Once you click the button, click on your simulation and a box will appear. Drag the box around the window to change what part of your simulation you see in the main screen.

Use the scroll button on your mouse to zoom in and out.

Yep, it’s as easy as that! Click here to see a video of this feature in action.

Did you find this tip useful? Is there anything you’d like us to cover next week? If so, please let us know.

We’ve noticed that when there are feature stories about simulation the main focus is usually about the success and benefits of the simulation or  project. This story is slightly different; it’s about the way SIMUL8 Corporation’s consulting team works with its clients.

Gatwick Airport in London, England, is engaged in a long term plan to drive improvements for passengers, airlines and cost efficiency. Having used simulation previously, and other external consulting firms to provide input to their decision making process, the team at Gatwick have a lot of experience of getting external assistance with change management.

What’s different this time is SIMUL8’s approach.  Rather than write a detailed spec, build, run and deliver numerical results, SIMUL8 delivers a series of evolutions of simulation models that can run – with any parameter values.  So, if the team at Gatwick want to try 72 check-ins with 9 airlines, each with its own imported passenger profile- they can do that.

Plus, they can do it live in meetings to provide fast answers to questions and the back-up of “here is why” demonstrations of passenger flows.

The team at Gatwick says the way SIMUL8’s consultants work; interactively and in steps as small as they like is a huge contrast to their previous experience of external consultants. Typically they want to debate what is and is not included in a specification or decline to take on blocks of  smaller jobs. In addition, some external consultants aim for customers to be dependent on them for answers, which can delay work and often comes at a cost.

Although consulting is important to support customers, SIMUL8’s business model relates mostly to creating and selling easy to use simulation software. This means that the consulting team can concentrate on making sure that the benefits are available to the client rather than concentrating on how to maximize their billed hours.

At SIMUL8 we pride ourselves in offering our customers fast and flexible support. Have other examples of fast and flexible support you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

This week we will be running through pooled resources and time dependent resources. A pooled resource lets you put several resources in a group, allowing you to assign that group to a Work Center. This means that when a Work Center needs a particular Resource (specified by clicking the RESOURCES button in the Work Center dialog) and that Resource is a Pool Resource, SIMUL8 will look at the Resources inside that pool and try to find one of the Resources that contribute to that pool. This is useful when you have a number of resources and either of them can complete the task. The resources in a pool can still be used independently too though.

You can also apply rules to the selection process; by default SIMUL8 uses the list sequence that the Resources are displayed in the MEMBERS dialog to select which resources to pull. Alternatively circulate will pull each Resource in turn.

When Resources are in a pool, you can also adjust the time a task at a Work Center takes depending on which member of the pool is used.

Below is the timing dialog that lets you define the time it will take to conduct a task IF a particular Resource is used to satisfy a need for any one of the Resource from a Resource pool. To access this dialog check the Timing Depends on Resource check box in the Resource pool members dialog and then click the Timing button for each Resource in the pool.

By default the information you enter will just be applied directly as the timing information in whatever Work Center the Resource is used in. However, if you set the distribution to be used to FIXED and you check Use Fixed Value as a delay Factor then the value will be used to modify the time in the Work Center. For example, if you enter 1.5 then any Work Center where the Resource is used will have its processing time increased by 50%.

Let’s use an Emergency Department as an example. You have three Work Centers; Triage, Bandage and Operation. Both Doctors and Nurses can Triage a patient, but it takes the nurses longer to do this. Only nurses can apply bandages and only Doctors can carry out an Operation.

So, we need to create two resources, Nurses, Doctors and a pooled Resource; Medical Staff, containing both Doctors and Nurses. As nurses take longer to triage a patient we have to ensure that timing is dependent on Resource and apply a delay factor if nurses are used.

Did you find this helpful in understanding what a pool Resource is, and how to use it? We hope so!

This week’s tip will show you how to select a resource that will process work at a Work Center based on the label value of the work item.

As this Friday’s Tip is titled ‘Label Based Resources’ you may be wondering what ‘Label Based Resources’ do. Let me fill you in; Label Based Resources allow the Resource that is required at a Work Center to be determined according to a Label Value.

Confused? Don’t be, it’s easy. Here’s how you do it:

Once your model is set up click on  the Work Entry Point, we use Actions to set up a label called Type. We set it to have a value of 1 – 4.

In Work Center 1, in Resources, we add each of our 4 available resources. We tick “select resource by label”, now Resource 1 will process all work of type 1, Resource 2 will process all work of type 2 etc.

If you’re wondering where this can be used, a call center is a good example of where this would be implemented. I hope you found this helpful. How do you think Label Based Resources can improve your processes?

This week’s Friday Tip will show you how to change the image of a work item based on a label value. This is really great for showing different types of work or if you just want to add in some random variety; for example if your work items are people, you may want them to all look different.

Reserved Label Image

SIMUL8 has several reserved label names which are used automatically by SIMUL8. Image: is one of these reserved labels. Image: as its name suggests lets you change the image of a work item.

How it works

If a work item has a numeric label with a name beginning Image: and that label is listed in a work center’s or work entry point’s label actions then SIMUL8 will take the rest of the labels name and add it to the label’s value and look for an image with that name.

How to create the model

1. Create 3 images called ball1, ball2, ball3
2. Create a numeric label called Image:ball
   
3. In label actions for the work entry point set Image:ball to a rounded uniform distribution with values 1 to 3.

Please note that in all cases, the image button in the work center’s graphics dialog has priority over any changes to images made via labels.

What else would you like to learn about labels?