FlexSim

Fully functional 3D simulation modeling tool

Comments: Large scale factory simulations for shipbuilding process optimization

Pros:

Functionality of teh hybrid model combining process flow detail and modularity with 3D representations.

Cons:

Difficult to find adequate help on advanced programming features and functions

FlexSim for Industrial Automation

Comments: It's been rewarding, in that it's allowed us to visualize a lot of things we hadn't previously. The customer service has been phenomenal and they're constantly pushing out revisions to improve the user experience and add features.

Pros:

It's relatively easy to get a model going on a high-level. It has been very useful in fleshing out concepts for work cell designs and visualizing process-flows, bottlenecks, etc..The customer support is the best I've seen for any software. There's an online community where the developers will answer, in detail, any question asked within an hour. And they will work with any user directly on their model to resolve issues.

Cons:

The software isn't very robust. It has a number of errors you have to weed through, particularly when you're trying to model something that isn't a pre-defined object. Something as simple as making an operator in the model pull a single box off of a pallet that's in a rack took a week and multiple questions to figure out and required programming multiple objects in C++. Bringing in a 3D model for a machine can be frustrating, due to the way sizes are defined. It typically drops in about 1000x larger and takes awhile to get sized correctly.There is no object edge detection. Operators and vehicles will natively travel through any object to get somewhere. So you have to designate paths and boundaries which can eat up processing speed.

My grad student was working on a hospital project using FlexsimHC.

Comments: Animation feature of the software was a good help when making presentations to healthcare professionals who don't know much about computer simulation.

Pros:

The animation features and functionality of FlexsimHC were very helpful for the project that we needed to test different scenarios for capacity analysis and scheduling of key resources.

Cons:

My grad student was creating a simulation model for a med/surg unit using FlexsimHC. There were some hidden bugs causing the problems of simulation runs and the tech support was not able to help fix...

FlexSim - A powerful improvement tool

Comments: I have used FlexSim to model several systems over the past 18 years: multiple distribution centers; a restaurant kitchen operation; a rail yard; a harvesting operation and several large manufacturing operations in several industries. As a professional I have honed my simulation modeling skills over the years and FlexSim has been part of that growth through their excellent technical support and continuous improvement and expansion of the FlexSim software.

Pros:

In my profession, it is important that a simulation package is flexible enough to apply to many types of systems, powerful enough handle very large and complex operations if necessary, and user-friendly so that projects can be completed efficiently and at the lowest cost possible. FlexSim hits high marks in all of these areas. As a past user of other simulation software packages, I can say that Flexsim has been an outstanding software package to use and has continued to grow in value for me over the past 18 years. In addition, I have found the customer service/technical support from Flexsim to be exceptional.

Cons:

I don't have any real "cons" at this time. I tend to push FlexSim to its limits with the applications that I try to model. At this time, the biggest issue that I am having is working with cranes (limited ability to handle multiple cranes on a single rail, for example). With that said, the technical support group works with me to develop work-arounds for handle current FlexSim limitations at they occur.

A perfect example of OOD design

Pros:

I like the way FlexSim models the world. The concepts of flow items, fixed resources, transporters are perfect abstract of massive real-world use cases. FlexSim has rich pre-built library that can meet most customers' requirements and users don't need to master programming in order to master FlexSim. More than this, FlexSim is so extensible with FlexScript and c++ so can literally build anything with the building blocks provided by FlexSim and your creativity. Not mention that their customer service is excellent, any questions post on their forum will be taken care of by their engineers within a short time.

Cons:

FlexSim only supports Window but I use a Mac computer so I have to install a virtual machine locally to use FlexSim. It would be wonderful if they provide dock image/mac version/web based application.