Nov 9 2012
The award, presented at the 11th Annual C+D Awards Dinner and Partnership Celebration on Thursday, Oct. 25, recognizes outstanding public / private collaboration.
Bob McDonald, Chairman, President and CEO of P&G, CEAS Interim Dean Teik C. Lim and Laura Becker, P&G General Manager, Global Business Development.
Among P&G’s hundreds of partners, the University of Cincinnati was one of just seven recognized for its innovation and collaboration in driving business results, including work in securing external funding sources and access to IP or capabilities.
The "5 plus 5 over 5" partnership is a pledge from P&G for joint funding actions as well as collaborative research with UC spanning five years. This includes $5 million over a five year period. Additionally, UC and P&G intend to work together to raise matching funds of up to $5 million over the period of five years.
“As the UC founding director of the Simulation Center (Sim Center), I am extremely pleased to announce that this award will ensure its longevity and provides additional recognition of the Sim Center’s success and contributions to this point,” said Dr. Lim. “I’m especially pleased with the number of our graduates and student participants in the Sim Center who have gone on to outstanding careers and particularly pleased with the number who have joined P&G. Our students are where great engineering truly begins.”
The UC Simulation Center, a collaborative effort between the University of Cincinnati and P&G, opened in 2008. The Center’s collaborative teams of P&G and UC engineers and students have worked on dozens of P&G projects over the years. These collaborations give P&G access to solutions and talent, while providing students opportunities to work on real-time projects. P&G has hired a number of students through the program, with several more going on to work at many of P&G’s suppliers and partners.
“We’re pleased to have received the extraordinary support of the ‘5 plus 5 over 5’ partnership and the C+D award,” said Dr. Brent (Bernie) Rudd, UC Simulation Center operations manager. “I’m delighted to know that our students and graduates, in working with our mentoring and engineering partners at P&G, have a leg up.”
One of these students, who went on to join P&G research staff, worked on novel solutions for P&G to create new math algorithms that were used on highly proprietary solutions for P&G. By working with P&G and UC mentors, this student was able to use them in a non-proprietary fashion so that his work and thesis could be published.
The Sim Center capitalizes on the college’s computer simulation expertise to provide P&G with cost-effective, high value virtual modeling and simulation capabilities, that are applied to their products and manufacturing processes, while developing a talent pipeline for future recruitment.
The Sim Center is credited with expediting solutions to critical commercial problems quickly and at a fraction of the cost of more traditional approaches. “The more virtual engineering we can do, the more we can save in terms of costs, time, engineering resources, etc. We can do far more parametric studies applying virtual models — such as different sizes and shapes — because there is no retooling of fabrication machines,” Lim, said. “For example, this practice has been gaining popularity amongst major automotive companies like Ford, Mercedes and Toyota because they cannot afford to build several variations of the same car.”
Through student and P&G collaborations, the center focuses on areas such as manufacturing reliability engineering, plant layout, Web modeling, packaging analyses, fluid flow in porous media and fit