Berner International estimates that its use of Blue Ridge Numerics’ CFdesign software will yield a 10-15% growth in sales of its commercial air door models.

BACKGROUND

Berner International Corp. is a leading U.S. manufacturer of air doors/air curtains for commercial, retail, food service and industrial applications. Its core competency is creating and applying a uniform air stream in a variety of environments. The New Castle, Pennsylvania-based corporation celebrates its golden anniversary this year.

THE CHALLENGE

Berner International knew it had a superior air door product, but it had no way of visually demonstrating the thermal, cooling or energy-saving advantages of that product to prospective customers—or to disprove competitor claims that the Berner line of doors was inferior. Since Berner is really selling an invisible item--air flow activity—even its most articulate sales reps, managers and engineers could only give an approximate description of how a Berner door would perform under actual conditions.

Another disadvantage Berner had was its inability to quickly and efficiently design new prototype doors and thoroughly explore all the performance capabilities of those designs in test situations. At best, Berner could only guestimate the correct measurements it would need for a particular fan or motor component of the air door. To be on the safe side, Berner might have to overcompensate on what a client really needed and spend twice the time and money on outsource testing its prototypes to make sure they work.

By opting for Blue Ridge Numerics’ CFDesign solution in 2005, Berner could eliminate one-half to two-thirds of the engineering, production and assembly time it now spends on its project prototypes. The precision of the prototype measurements that CFDesign produced lets Berner tell clients exactly what they would need instead of chancing an unnecessary expenditure on a larger item.

Berner’s own product costs for its finished items will fall by 10-15% because of its superior design capability. Based on a rough estimate of annual unit output, that could mean savings of $315,000. It won’t have to waste money on new spec products or components. Now, instead of outsourcing prototype tests twice for each product line, Berner only has to do it once—at a savings of $12,000 per project.

Blue Ridge Numerics’ solution makes it a lot easier for Berner International’s sales reps to do their jobs. Dave Johnson, Berner’s senior engineer, explains it this way: “Not only would this definitely be used to gain market share. Everything we would explain to new customers or engineers we would also be showing to our sales agents and explaining it in the exact same way: here’s an illustration of how our products work under all different scenarios—different winds, different temperatures and so forth.”

THE SOLUTION

DESIGN TOOL MEETS, SHOWS V.V.U. STANDARD COMPLIANCE

Before: For air doors to properly seal openings, they need to establish a correct balance between air volume, velocity and uniformity, or V.V.U. But that’s not something that Berner International could easily explain to its managers and sales reps in-house or to its outside client prospects without CFDesign. Nor could it successfully achieve that V.V.U. balance without going through an exhaustive amount of trial-and-error tinkering, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough. About 20% of Berner’s business is custom applications, but some of those sales opportunities went begging because it was just too hard or too time-consuming to create the correct design. Berner lost about $10,000 per year on product clients rejected after receiving it for research and testing purposes from Berner.

Today: CFDesign has given Berner the ability to launch a product development that can establish, predict and demonstrate V.V.U. air flow balance on new and existing products. Since Berner’s contract with Blue Ridge calls for $8,000 worth of free consulting on the initial project, Berner can utilize Blue Ridge’s CFDesign expertise to set the V.V.U. parameters and determine what flow, pressure, temperature and/or other analyses are necessary to reach project goals.

Berner can use the Blue Ridge software to bring more engineering refinement to its products and display how that level of work gets superior performance vis-à-vis competitor offerings. This gives them leverage to sell at a premium price and go against the industry grain, which is treating air doors like a commodity instead. It also makes it unnecessary for clients to field-test products for custom application. That saves $5,000-$10,000 per year on otherwise-rejected or spent product.

THE WINNING EDGE IS FUNCTIONALITY

Before: Blue Ridge Numerics came late to the bidding process for Berner International’s business. One of its two major rivals cost $11,000 less for software, maintenance and training. The other, though costlier than Blue Ridge, also yielded absolute values for complex simulations, whereas Blue Ridge provided relative values. Ultimately, Blue Ridge had to justify its price differential in order to win the competition.

Today: CFDesign emerged victorious in Berner’s cost-benefit analysis largely because of its technical versatility. There was a lot of functionality and freedom packed into the $26,000 price for Blue Ridge Numerics’ software. Berner could do as many evaluations as it wanted on all design and application iterations and as many tests as it needed to correlate new data. When Blue Ridge constructed a simple visualization model where Berner could see all the technical capabilities inherent in the software it was sold.

In Berner’s cost-benefit analysis, Johnson and colleague Phillip Thomas pointed out that it would be financially prohibitive for a consultant to analyze as many design and application iterations as CFDesign could do, and that CFDesign could furnish the geometric calculations for fan rotation. Under the consultant option, Berner would have to do the geometry itself. Berner’s aim is to grow its market share and solidify its market-leader status. If it had to develop its V.V.U. balance mechanisms manually, without CFD software, to achieve that goal, it would have to build two additional labs with heating and cooling sources, and obtain additional variables testing and data analysis equipment.

TECHNOLOGY AS A SALES AND MARKETING WEAPON

Before: Berner International’s sales reps could talk about the results of traditional laboratory tests on Berner’s existing design processes. Yet they were hamstrung by the shortcomings inherent in those processes. The lab tests couldn’t definitively prove that particular prototypes would fit client needs for a dependable air seal and controlled air flow. Nor could the sales reps show any proof that a particular design solution worked. This lack of seeing-is-believing simulation kept Berner from utilizing its website as an effective form of marketing. Berner would have to outsource preparation of product proposals, a process that could cost the company $20,000-$30,000.

Today: The power of visualizing the product solution through CFDesign is something that Berner International will integrate into its formal sales force training. That will empower reps to communicate Berner’s knowledge as the pre-eminent industry expert to customers. “Just having that visual will help support what were saying,” observes Berner’s marketing vice president, Alison Clingensmith. “Our sales force was telling customers ‘well, you need a certain percentage of the uniformity or a certain percentage of [air flow] to protect an opening from a certain amount of wind velocity.’ Whereas now, we’re able to visually show it to them.”

Customers will be able to see this online, too, as Berner is retooling its website to include the CFDesign animations. Right now, Berner is determining how to integrate that into the existing website material and has worked about three-quarters of the animation-based information into its sales training and marketing programming. Berner used CFDesign to do seal testing at a recent trade show, and it successfully identified high-quality sales leads.

THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT

Blue Ridge Numerics can produce several key metric improvements for Berner International through its CFDesign software tool.

• Commercial air door sales should grow 10-15%.

• Time and money spent on outsourced testing of prototypes should be cut by one half to two-thirds; the cost savings would be about $12,000 per project.

• Finished product costs should drop by 10-15%, for an annual savings of up to $315,000 on unit output.

• Berner would receive $8,000 worth of free consulting advice on CFDesign utilization.

• Total testing time would be one-half to one-third what it had been without CFDesign.

• Savings of $5,000-$10,000 per year would result from eliminating trial-and-error client testing of product.

• Product proposals could be designed in-house, rather than being outsourced at a cost of $20,000-$30,000.

CLOSING

Blue Ridge Numerics’ CFDesign software package is enabling Berner International to create and evaluate designs, products and applications with much greater precision, and with much less time and money spent on engineering, production, testing and assembly. Designers get a better understanding of airflow activity and customers get a much clearer understanding of why air curtains are beneficial investments. “I always have a lot of confidence in our product and how it works,” Johnson emphasizes. “Some other people don’t, so it’s very satisfying to be able to say, ‘see, look! This is what I was saying. Now I can illustrate it. Now you can see it and now you may be more apt to believe me.’”