Ne faut-il que délibérer,
La cour en conseillers foisonne;
Est-il besoin d'exécuter,
L'on ne rencontre plus personne.
(Jean de La Fontaine, 1668)
To put it in a nutshell, Alma Consulting provides services in the field of industrial and precision systems. That said, this means that we will help you reaching your goals, specifically when they require you to go beyond your comfort zone. Most often, this happens because of increasingly demanding requirements, which makes it no longer sufficient to have various disciplines -mechanics, electronics, optics- working in isolation. At this point, an architect is needed, equipped with multiphysics conceptual and practical tools.
So, how does this work in practice?
We take pride in working for a diversity of industrial and academic systems or facilities, so that there is no hard procedure to follow. Rather, we like to think to our services are best described and thought as a dialogue:
Hi! I want my product to deliver truly precision-class results. However, my customers noticed this is not always the case, and I am having a hard time deciding whether the external conditions at the client premises are solely responsible for that, or if my design actually should be more rugged. And in that case, what do I need to do ?
Well, in that case, it could be advised to start by quantifying the current susceptibility of the system. That would be done typically using a combination of measurements and system identification procedures. Then, based on your target performance, the corresponding adequate environmental conditions (vibrations, temperature, pressure, humidity) will be determined. Once this is done, you are in a position do decide if it is advisable to require your customers to improve their working conditions, or if your system susceptibility shoud be reduced.
Nice. But then, assuming I want to improve my design, what comes next? Can I get a turnkey solution? Or merely guidance? Trainings ? Assistance in designing/implementing modifications ?
More often than not, off-the-shelf solutions will only provide modest improvement of the performance and might not be sufficient. We will, however, provide you with ballpark values so that you can decide for yourself wich route you want to take.
When drastic improvements are required, we recommend to work with you as co-designers. This will typically require that we firstly introduce you the main notions and practical procedure, and from this point, work in close cooperation. In this way, relevant decisions can be made, from re-design trade-offs to implementation. And of course, this will help you integrating the lessons learned into your practice.