Three Industrial Design Engineering Software Capabilities That Will Make Or Break Your Engineering Strategy

Engineering teams are facing tighter delivery timelines, persistent labour shortages, siloed tools, disconnected simulation environments and ongoing handover challenges. Fragmented FEED and detailed engineering frequently result in late-stage design inconsistencies, driving rework, cost overruns and schedule slippage. As a result, industrial design engineering (IDE) software is no longer just a productivity tool, but a critical enabler of project success and long-term asset value. Research assessing 39 leading IDE software vendors highlights a growing focus on advanced simulation, multidisciplinary collaboration, AI-driven workflows and improved data traceability (see Verdantix Buyer’s Guide: Industrial Design And Engineering (IDE) Software (2025)).

Selecting the right software has become essential for engineering performance across the asset life cycle, which is why buyers should be on the lookout for:

• Automation that offsets shrinking engineering workforces.
  With one-fifth of the engineering workforce retiring by 2030 in the UK alone, alongside increasingly compressed project schedules, automation is becoming essential to sustaining engineering capacity and design quality. IDE software vendors such as Autodesk, AVEVA and SLB are embedding automation through AI and agentic workflows to streamline routine tasks, accelerate model iteration and support rule-based design validation. These capabilities can also support junior engineers with guided workflows and provide design context to accelerate skills development. Buyers should ensure that any AI and automation tools can actually deliver tangible engineering outcomes rather than serve as a perfunctory feature to keep up with trends.
  
• A unified, data-centric source of truth across disciplines.
  Rising electrification, sustainability and safety demands have made collaboration between process, electrical, instrumentation, structural and safety engineers become even more critical. A single source of truth enables teams to work in parallel with greater confidence, improving coordination and reducing rework. High value technologies can enable design changes to propagate automatically across models and documents, making sure that all parties are working with consistent, up-to-date information. Additionally, using platforms that facilitate cloud-based collaboration is becoming essential for coordinating multidiscipline project delivery across organizations.
  
• Seamless transition from design to construction to operations.
  Handover remains one of the most persistent challenges in industrial projects; from a construction perspective, design issues account for three of the top five causes of project disputes. IDE platforms that support interoperability from detailed design through to construction and operational systems are better prepared for effective handover and operational readiness. This is facilitated by structuring engineering data for downstream use in operational technology (OT), asset performance management (APM) and maintenance systems. As predictive maintenance and digital twin technologies mature, operational requirements increasingly need to be considered during detailed design. Maintaining data quality and governance throughout the asset life cycle should therefore be a key priority for buyers.
  

As corporate decision-makers seek to reduce vendor lock-in and maintain continuity across project stages, interoperability is emerging as a critical point of differentiation. This raises a central question: how willing are vendors to adapt their platforms to integrate with competing tools and meet critical interoperability requirements? At the same time, the market remains divided between efforts to establish standardized methodologies for design data exchange from detailed engineering into operations, and the continued expansion of proprietary ecosystems, creating ongoing uncertainty for owner-operators and EPCs seeking long-term platform flexibility.