Mechanical Simulation Corporation
September 1999
"We've made it three years, which is hard to argue with," says Steve Hann, the founder, and head of sales and planning, of Mechanical Simulation Corporation (MSC), an engineering software firm founded in 1996 and based in Ann Arbor. MSC exclusively develops, maintains and distributes AutoSim, TruckSim, and CarSim for use in the simulation of vehicle-road interactions and the dynamics of ground vehicles. MSC provides consulting, Real Time Systems, and software to companies all over the world, and has grown from its original two employees (Hann and Mike Sayers, head of engineering) to six, with more growth in sight. AutoSim and TruckSim were originally developed by Sayers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), and MSC still has close ties with UMTRI. "We share ideas," says Hann. A press release generated by the UM Office of Technology Transfer helped bring Hann and Sayers together. "I was living in Japan from 1989 to 1994, doing consulting work in multibody dynamics, and I found out about Mike Sayers' software from that press release in a mechanical engineering publication. When I came back to the U.S., I met Mike, and we decided we would try to sell his dissertation software in Japan." Within two years, there was more business than they could handle in their spare time. "We had six people on contract, UMTRI researchers that were working nights and weekends," says Hann. "I was over at UMTRI nearly full-time before a contract was finished. That's when we decided to turn it into a real company. We were always behind schedule." They also needed time to commercialize their products. "A lot of the things you have to do to take a product and make it really robust and ready for general use are things the university isn't good at," says Sayers. "What would be the final two percent of a project in a research setting turns out to be the final 85% when it's commercialized, which is just getting all the bugs out and developing a user's manual. And if you don't do those things, your market is pretty much limited to other researchers." And a bigger market is their goal. "AutoSim was a tool for researchers and developers," says Hann. "There are maybe 20 customers in the world, but CarSim and TruckSim are used all over." "And they're used by less specialized people who are actually designing products and evaluating car and truck performance," says Sayers. "That's tens of thousands of engineers." Hann is happy to credit the UM's role. "Their notice is what got us together," he says. "The other thing is the University still owns the software on which our product is based. We have to give them the best recommendation."Printed from: http://www.techtransfer.umich.edu/news_events/success_stories/story_8.php