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 FunctionBay GmbH (FBG) was founded in 2003 by German ex-Mechanical Dynamics people and today comprises 11 colleagues. Tanja-Alexandra Lange and Thomas Kelichhaus are founders and managing directors of FunctionBay GmbH.

Members:

Thomas Kelichhaus is on the one hand in charge of the international affairs of FunctionBay GmbH and on the other hand together with Tanja-Alexandra Lange responsible for the presales activities of RecurDyn in Europe. Both together are mostly upfront by prospects to introduce the capabilities of RecurDyn, but also in order to listening to the prospects to gain a better knowledge of their demands. The perfect communication with the headquarter makes it possible, that FunctionBay quickly reacts to the needs of the users and finds good solutions within a short period of time.

Furthermore, Stefan Bayreuther is responsible not only for direct and indirect sales but also for markting. Stefan Bayreuther takes care of the prospects and also supports the European RecurDyn distributors.

Uwe Eiselt is the Technical Manager of FunctionBay GmbH. He came from MSC Software, where he was responsible for service and hotline for the ADAMS business. In 2005 he decided to switch from MSC Software to FunctionBay, where he started as an Application Engineer. Due to his outstanding performance, Uwe Eiselt was quite soon nominated as Technical Manager of FunctionBay GmbH.

Uwe’s team consists of Nancy Bernhardt, Application Engineer, Harald Weinbrenner, Senior Application Engineer, Timo Giese, Project Manager Research & Development and Ivaylo Haralampiev, who is the programmer at FBG. Before joining FBG in 2012,

Nancy was working at ThyssenKrupp Presta Steering, where she introduced RecurDyn in 2011. Harald joined FBG already in 2003 and like Uwe was also coming from MSC.Software respectively MDI at that time.

Timo did his final thesis at the Technical University of Munich in the area of machine tool where he worked on the RecurDyn/MachineTool topic. Initially he had a part time student job and we could hire him in 2008 to fully work for FBG. This year Timo was promoted to be responsible for the local FBG research activities. Ivaylo (short form: Ivo) studied IT at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and like Timo initially worked as a student for FBG. We also hired him after he finished his Diploma at the TUM. Last but not least, Susanne Burghard is the classical heart and soul of the team, since she is managing the office and is heavily involved in finance and administration.

Furthermore, two students are working for the German office: Kevin Kelichhaus, who is working on the evaluation of RecurDyn models and is doing principle studies and Philip Ziegler, who is supporting Stefan Bayreuther concerning web side and marketing activities.

•  History:

2003 FunctionBay Inc. decided that it was the right time, to introduce RecurDyn to the European market, since in ASIA and USA this software program was already well known. At that time, an American colleague, Karl Bangert, who already used to work for FunctionBay USA heard that FunctionBay Inc. was looking for capable people to launch RecurDyn in Europe. He nominated Thomas Kelichhaus and Tanja-A. Lange, since they had been former colleagues at Mechnical Dynamics Inc. Thomas Kelichhaus had been the General Manager of MDI and Tanja-A. Lange was in charge of direct and indirect sales, but since in 2002 MSC Software purchased MDI, they were both “open” for new challenges. So, when Thomas Kelichhaus was contacted by FBK, he flew to USA to meet Brant Ross and to learn more about FB and the RecurDyn software. While testing RecurDyn, Thomas decided that the new recursive formalism technology, on which RecurDyn is based, could be also competitive in the European market. He then convince Tanja-A. Lange and Dr. Frank Fassbender to join him to found FunctionBay GmbH on 2003/January/23rd. Frank later left FunctionBay and is now working as a sub-distributor for FunctionBay GmbH until today.

•  What is the most powerful means when selling RecurDyn at the Europe market?

The key to success in Europe is to outrival the rigid business behavior of the established competitors by showing up as a totally customer oriented small but flexible organization. For example while it often takes up to two week to get a trial license from FBG’s competitors we typically deliver license keys overnight. Hotline calls are answered within an hour time frame while others sometimes never respond at all or just give you a caller id with a response of an unskilled young engineer a few days later. It is an iron rule that we never let the customers down, whatever it takes on our side. In that case we appreciate the support of FunctionBay Korea development a lot who make things happens, sometimes also overnight when it is a critical issue.

•  What do you believe are RecurDyn's strong points compared with other CAE software?

From a technical point of view, customers like the usability of the GUI a lot and of course MFBD and the toolkits are welcome differentiators when it comes to a benchmark situation. In the classical rigid body dynamics area (RecurDyn/Professional) we see the analytical contacts as very helpful features. As all customers are individual, it is not easy to supply software which meets all special demands of our Users. So RD/PNET gives us the possibility to add short term functionality to RecurDyn and tailor RecurDyn exactly to their needs. As most of competitors are much bigger companies they cannot adjust their software with the same speed we can do.

•  Please introduce RecurDyn's success story at the Europe market.

As a product supplier and systems integrator, Siemens Energy & Automation provides products, services and solutions to energy providers and industrial clients needing reliable and cost-effective electrical service from the mid-voltage transformer to the consumer. In the development of low-voltage switches promising new concepts are compiled and the relative performance assessed using simulation and testing. To accelerate the new development of the mechanical switching devices a lot of virtual testing is done with the help of different simulation tools. “Advanced development and simulation are closely tied together” said the Dr. Michael Anheuser, Director of Advanced Development and Simulation at Siemens Automation and Drives, Low-Voltage Controls and Distribution. “We utilize various tools, from simple Excel macros of bending formulas to complex CAE programs.”

In 2004 Siemens decided to benchmark software packages that were already used and new ones. Fairly quickly it was determined that RecurDyn was well-suited for the target application due to its extensive simulation capabilities, quick solver, user-friendliness and adaptable methods of model construction. “RecurDyn was clearly the best tool for our application. In addition, we found that FunctionBay provided very good technical support. The employees of the software supplier reacted quickly and flexibly to our inquiries and we were able to perform substantial work with their support,” stresses Dr. Anheuser: “The greatest benefits of RecurDyn simulation for us in Advanced Development are in the areas of model generation, development and evaluation”. Also here the MFBD technology of RecurDyn showed up to be a huge benefit: “We would like to pursue this further in the future by using the RecurDyn MFBD Toolkit to simulate the flexible components in the assembly that operate in highly dynamic conditions, in order to further optimize our products,” stresses the director.

As a matter of fact up to today, Siemens is the biggest RecurDyn user in Europe – a real success story.

•  What do you think is an ability of RecurDyn in order to obtain a larger portion of the Europe market in the future?

The biggest critics with RecurDyn are that many Users/prospect say that RecurDyn shows some very good ideas but from a practical point of view it is “half baked”. So features may work properly with “University style problems” but are a head ache with real live complex problems. As a conclusion it needs a lot of support from our side to satisfy our Users demands. For example we have to run almost as many support engineers as MSC has for ADAMS, but we may have only 1/10 of their customer base. As we want to grow in Europe mainly by getting resellers on board, we face the situation that the resellers are not willing to invest into a huge service organization for RecurDyn like we do because the sales margin can easily go to negative.

Notwithstanding that the biggest unique selling point is MFBD in theory it takes a lot of experience to carve out real advantages in the CAE process compared to other FEA codes. So our resellers need a lot of training to be enabled to show the advantages of MFBD in benchmarks and software presentation situations.

At the moment we feel that our direction to better serve the drive train market with professional toolkits in the area of gears, chain, belt etc. together with industrial partners like Kisssoft could be a very beneficial way to get a bigger portion of the European market.