The continued exploitation and uptake of short fibre composites in a range of industrial applications would be greatly enhanced if the designer was able to carry out the complete design process within a computer. This would speed up the design process significantly and allow the materials to be used in a more cost effective, and greener, manner. In this paper we will aim to assess the state of the art in this process. For this study we have chosen a simple component, in this case a centre gated inverted cup with height 28mm and an outer diameter of 95mm. The side walls were 5mm thick and top moulded in three conditions with thicknesses of 1, 2 and 4 mm. Samples, for comparison with the computer predictions, were injection moulded from Rhodia 216 v40 40% wt short glass fibre reinforced nylon 6 and were produced using the manufacturer’s moulding conditions. Autodesk Simulation Moldflow Insights was used to predict fibre orientation during the injection moulding process. Orientation data, along with mechanical properties for the matrix and fibres, was then passed to ABAQUS finite element modeller for the analysis of a simple displacement at the centre of the disc using a 12.7 mm radius indentor. Results at all stages were compared with experimental data.