Excerpt from IIE Solutions Magazine *
February 2001
Reader Review

Extend-ing Simulation

G. Allen Pugh, Dean of Engineering, Technology, and Computer Science and Professor of Industrial Engineering Technology and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing Technology and is a senior member of IIE

What an academic finds useful is not necessarily what works well in the industrial world. So how does a professor judge the power and usefulness of products? One of the most valuable ways is unsolicited feedback from students who have graduated and become practitioners. Of all the simulation tools I have used, only one has gotten consistently positive feedback. Engineers a mere year or two out of school have marched proudly into my office to announce that they have saved their employers considerable expense using this tool.

The Extend simulation modeling tool by Imagine That! is available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms. The interface is intuitive. Both continuous and discrete models may be constructed by selecting icons from libraries and drawing connections between them. Most students can build simple models in minutes. Models of significant complexity can be constructed this way, but Extend also allows users to build customized blocks for unique situations.

The animation features in Extend, while meager compared to top-of-the-line simulation packages, are adequate for de-bugging and, more importantly, for presentation to managers as persuasive evidence. Many libraries are included with the base product and several more are available for an additional cost.

* Reprinted with permission from February 2001 "IIE Solutions". (c) 2001, Institute of Industrial Engineers. All rights reserved.