With every new release as well as making lots of features to make SIMUL8 easier and better for people new to simulation, we make sure we don’t forget about our loyal long term users. How could we, here at S8 Headquarters we’ve got lots of consultants and trainers using SIMUL8 daily, so when you’re not requesting features on our Support Desk they’re shouting on your behalf!

So if you’ve been using SIMUL8 for awhile what features will you like the best?

Spreadsheets in Dialogs

As a SIMUL8 user my favorite feature this year is the ability to add spreadsheets into a custom dialog. Why do I like this so much? I’m a big fan of creating interfaces for your simulation so that you can easily share your simulation with anyone without them having to learn anything about SIMUL8. Before 2012 you could have radio buttons, edit boxes etc. But that structure was quite restrictive. You could have displayed a SIMUL8 spreadsheet to get a bit more creative freedom, but it was within the edit style dialog so you could get users going off doing crazy things in cells you don’t want them to touch and also just didn’t look as professional and simple as a custom dialog.

So now you can get the spreadsheet right inside the custom dialog which means:

• You can seamlessly integrate into a wizard chain of dialogs
• You can make use of the on open and on close visual logic events for a dialog
• The header rows and columns are automatically hidden for you so your spreadsheet looks great
• You can control how many cells are shown, so the user only ever sees what you want them to see

Read more about spreadsheets in dialogs in our online help files

Search label values

So I know I’m only supposed to pick one favorite, but it’s impossible with so many great features to choose from.

Searching label values is a tiny little feature but it is going to make life so much easier for you. You know when you’ve set up labels in your simulation to uniquely identify certain work items. When you’re validating your simulation you want to track these through or work out where your part is at a key time point. Well previously you had to set up some message boxes in Visual Logic or trawl through all the contents dialogs.

Not now! Now, you can just hit search label values and you can search every work item in your simulation for a specific label value. This will radically reduce the time to validate your simulation. One of our consultants literally screamed with joy when we revealed this feature in our internal taster sessions.

Read more about spreadsheets in dialogs in our online help files

The rest

There’s still lots of other little features you’re going to love, like jump start and our new visual logic commands. Check out our SIMUL8 2012 feature tour for details on all the new features.

I really hope you love SIMUL8 2012 as much as we do. And start sending in your requests for SIMUL8 2013 now, we’re already busy working on it.

It’s been a busy year preparing for the release of SIMUL8 2012, and I’m really proud that yet again we’ve released a ‘real’ upgrade, packed with new features and improvements.

As some of you might already know our vision is to get every process improver using simulation to help with decision making. We want to do this by focusing on making simulation really easy so that anyone can quickly and easily develop simulation skills. That’s always been our benchmark, to ensure we are always the easiest to use simulation tool in the market.

We are really excited about SIMUL8 2012 as it’s yet another step change in achieving our goal. With the addition of Lean Value Stream Mapping and BPMN this version is a huge leap forward in bringing the power of simulation to mainstream business process improvers.

So you might be wondering what we’ve done to move us closer to this vision, well here’s how…

Integrated BPMN and Lean

In SIMUL8 2012 we’ve integrated BPMN and Lean with SIMUL8, so now however you carry out your process improvement you can get the added value of simulation.

This is great if you’re new to simulation as you can map out your process in a way that’s familiar to you first. Then just add some process timings and some rules for how work is processed, let SIMUL8 add the real world variability and bring your process to life so you can really understand how it will perform in the real world and start making evidence based decisions.

Easy to Understand

We’re continuously trying to think of ways to make simulation easier. This not only makes it faster for new users to learn SIMUL8, but also makes the benefits of simulation clearer, which helps create buy-in within your organization.

So, with this in mind we’ve changed the names of the simulation objects. The change is really subtle but because the names of the objects now far better explain what they actually do it’s going to make it so much easier for you to learn SIMUL8 and also help you describe your simulation to others.

One of my favorite features for 2012 is our new high level analytics panel. From the first time you press ‘Run’ you are get meaningful results about your process. The results will quickly guide you to areas where there might be opportunities to improve your process. Then you can use SIMUL8′s more extended results tools to do more deeper analysis.

I’ve already seen the magic of this in action on a recent client visit. After one simulation run and seeing the results updating, everyone in the room started asking questions, what does that mean, why would that number say that, oh I didn’t know that was a bottle neck, and then moved onto generating loads of ideas for the best ways to improve their process. That’s the power of simulation, it’s not just about the simulation you build, or about looking at the results to understand the dynamics of your process, it’s all the interactive conversations that happen as a result that’s the most valuable and exciting part.

We really hope you like the new features! By making these changes we’re confident that even more users will be benefitting from simulation driven process improvement soon.

I’d love to hear your feedback on SIMUL8 2012, just get in touch and let us know your thoughts.

Still want to find out more?

Come along to our SIMUL8 2012 webinar? Whether you’re already a user, or just want to find out more, we have a webinar for you.