Guided simulation workflows for Ansys Mechanical engineers

The moment this problem surfaces is when an engineer — competent in FEA theory — sits down to set up a coupled thermal-structural analysis or a nonlinear contact problem and realizes the workflow is nowhere in the documentation. They know what they want to compute; they don't know what Ansys wants them to click, in what order, with what settings, and why any of it matters. They end up burning a day reading forum threads that were written for a different version.

This gap persists because Ansys has no structural incentive to fill it cleanly. Training revenue and consulting revenue both depend on the software being hard enough that customers pay for help. The people who suffer most — mid-level engineers at manufacturers who bought enterprise licenses — aren't the decision-makers who signed the contract, so their friction doesn't translate into sales pressure on Ansys.

What's missing isn't tutorial videos or documentation (those exist and users explicitly say they don't help). It's contextual, step-by-step workflow guidance anchored to the specific version of Ansys the engineer is running, the specific physics they're setting up, and the specific failure mode they're trying to predict. Users say Ansys should 'provide optional suggestions while entering values and guidance on possible next steps' — that's not a feature Ansys will prioritize because it competes with their paid training business.

Without this, a company running Ansys Mechanical spends real money on either formal Ansys training (expensive, generic, forgotten within a month) or on senior engineer time spent re-teaching the same workflow to every new hire. That cost recurs every time a project touches an unfamiliar physics type, every time a new engineer joins the team, and every time Ansys releases a version that rearranges the workflow.

What to build

Build a browser extension and desktop overlay that reads which Ansys Mechanical module and physics setup is currently open, then serves a curated, version-specific step-by-step checklist for that exact workflow — pulling from a structured knowledge base built by domain engineers, not scraped from documentation.

Where to start

Start with a single high-volume, well-defined workflow — static structural analysis with contact nonlinearity — where the setup errors are documented enough in forums that you can build the first checklist without needing to be Ansys-certified, then sell it to engineering managers at automotive suppliers who onboard two or three new FEA engineers per year.

The hard part

The knowledge base has to be built by people who actually understand both the physics and the Ansys-specific implementation details — you can't crowdsource or LLM your way to reliable guidance on nonlinear contact settings without an expert catching the errors, which makes content production slow and expensive before you have revenue.

How it makes money

Per-seat annual subscription, priced below the cost of one day of Ansys training per engineer; expansion comes when teams ask for additional physics modules to be covered.