Engineering Design In Perspective

Minor disputes between IT

historians apart, the dawn of the CAD/CAM industry in India could be roughly dated to the mid-eighties. The environment then was not too conducive to this fledgling IT niche. For one thing, in the full glory of the license raj, protective duty barriers, limited product choices and sheltered shortage economies–where a customer would cheerfully wait five years for a scooter delivery–Indian engineering was under little pressure to invest in CAD/CAM, and could afford a relatively laid-back posture. Secondly, serious computational and graphics processing was still in the mainframe and mini domain, where the import process category of more than Rs10 lakh could launch you easily on a voyage of two to three years. Thirdly, geopolitics was not in our favor. An indicator is India ‘enjoying’ one of the lowest international PDR ceilings from the US Department of Commerce. Lastly, although PC-CAD had just arrived, the horsepower of a PC/XT could support little more than entry-level 2D drafting. And justifying returns on investment against draftsmen’s salaries took a lot of creativity.

Solutions to beat the system



So the initial forays had to be along very sparse and thin market seams. Until workstations for under Rs10 lakh started arriving towards end-1986, first as imports, and shortly from local assembly. Rich in 32-bit computation, interactive graphics, networked computing and application suites, these workstations rapidly opened up and consolidated the market over the next few years. Yet, well into the nineties, the CAD/CAM penetration remained polarized–with limited expensive workstation seats at the design center or R&D end of the organization, and the lower cost PC-CAD drafting stations at the other end. 

Not surprisingly, a lot of the early patronage came not from private sector manufacturing and construction sectors, but from educational institutions and defense research-related public sector manufacturing. Globally, the education segment has been a major force multiplier for CAD/CAM business–for technology breakthroughs, for creating talent pools and for catalyzing usage in industry. The penetration in India, owing to high costs and low funding, tended to remain elitist till the early nineties. But in the past decade, the World Bank supported program for upgrading the quality of technical education has ensured proliferation of seats in more than a thousand engineering colleges and polytechnics. Yet, the corresponding academic infrastructure of quality courseware and teachers’ training remains inadequate. The private ATC network, although catering to more than 25,000 students a year, ends up mainly in teaching drafting. Concerted and strategic effort in upgrading the quality of CAD/CAM training could easily return rich dividends from global opportunities. This can match dividends from software and service exports in mainstream applications.

In the early nineties, economic liberalization started creating totally new competitive time-to-market and cost imperatives for Indian industry. Fortunately, the PC’s power started growing, becoming a viable platform for CAD/CAM applications beyond mere drafting. In fact, the two-way journey between vendors–downwards from workstations to desktops and upwards from PC-CAD–is almost complete, with NT as the meeting ground. The last distinctions could disappear in the next two to three years. Engineering seats started getting populated in significant numbers and the CAD/CAM industry started assuming mass market proportions from around 1993. 

Increasing MNC participation in every kind of products and services, lowering duty rates and rising customer expectations have created an unprecedented sense of urgency in design and engineering in just a few years. How urgent, was revealed to me graphically when I called on the Chief Designer of one of India’s largest automotive companies in mid-1996. He was looking absolutely fatigued, and on being asked as to whether he was not keeping well, he smiled and said no, he was fine. It was just that he hadn’t slept too much in the past three days. And this, because his team was working simultaneously on 32 new projects. In the previous ten years his company had undertaken no more than seven engineering change projects.

All application segments have not grown uniformly. The mechanical segment has matured most, as elsewhere in the world. The architecture and construction segment, which is the next big application area globally, is surprisingly one of the weakest in India, with the focus still on drafting and not design. An exception is the fairly widespread use of structural design and analysis packages. The PCB-design component of the EDA market has dwindled with liberalization of electronics import, leaving higher-end VLSI/ASIC design as a low-volume but high-value market. Plant and process applications have been limited to the consultants’ end, with owner operators yet to invest seriously in ongoing retrofit and maintenance applications.

A few exciting things have also started happening in the closing years of this decade. GIS applications–courtesy the sheer power and affordability of PC-based GIS–and internet enablement. Both have started breaking the ten-year-old mould of conventional land and resources information management usage. Large payoffs are happening in the management of utility networks, and new experiments are taking place in diverse areas like poll management, consumer marketing and tourist facilitation. Next, India is emerging fast as a preferred offshore resourcing area for MNCs for a host of services, ranging from software development and quality assurance, functional design, detail engineering and data creation and conversion. CAD/CAM is a late passenger on the great Indian bandwagon of software and services export, but the possibilities are formidable in the near term. Finally, what augurs well for most for this industry is that in the last two to three years, SMEs are adopting integrated CAD/CAM beyond drafting as a major strategic 



investment.

Despite the present lacunae in even basic implementation of PDM and ERP integration of design and engineering, we will get to enterprise product processes shortly. We will be creating networks of inter-related engineering, purchasing, and manufacturing and construction processes. We would use these to create products that delight, and to deliver them to customers.