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Hightech tools e-nabling Indian product design

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE OCT. 22. India-based mechanical product development across a wide range of applications from defence and aerospace to automobiles and consumer goods, has moved smoothly into a new era of web-enabled collaboration using state-of-the-art design tools. A two-day national users conference on the "The future of product lifecycle management" that ended here today, served as a veritable showcase of indigenous designing talent at both ends of the engineering spectrum.

Organised by EDS, the global IT services corporation that now incorporates two well-known engineering design tools — SDRC and Unigraphics — that have been widely used in India for decades, the conference brought together working engineers from heterogeneous disciplines who had graduated to a new post-Internet era of web-enabled cooperative development. Bangalore-based strategic aerospace and defence industries like HAL and ISRO, demonstrated how they had increasingly learnt to shorten the cycle from concept to product by exploiting IT-driven techniques like EDS' `TeamCenter'. P. S. Nair, Director, Structures, with the ISRO Satellite Centre here, explained that the number of different satellite vehicles being developed in parallel had exploded — to over 15 — even as futuristic tasks like an Indian Moon Mission were being addressed. To reduce repetitive development, ISRO had introduced a system of `adaptive architectural design', where multi-mission requirements were met through a `bus' concept': with common subsystems deployed across a range of end products.

Narender Reddy, President, PLM Solutions India, EDS, explained that major automotive manufacturers like Ashok Leyland, Mahindra and Escorts had totally automated their design processes and were extending collaborative design across geographically dispersed locations. He saw the emergence of India as an engineering design outsourcing destination — with quite a few multinational agencies encashing the rich human resource in computer assisted design in this country.

Ron Close, U.S.-based Vice President for Business Strategy with EDS/PLM explained that while the early players in such product lifecycle management exercises, tended to be the large manufacturing corporations, the use of `open' software standards that were `backward compatible' with legacy systems, as well as smooth scaling features, had brought a large number of small design houses into the fold. As an immediate illustration of this perception, the conference featured presentations by innovative companies which had used such tools to create a new line of Indian toys, including a scale miniature of the hardy `Ambassador'.

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