Engineered and Designed in India

Indias $3.6 bn engineering services exports industry has now been able to catch the imagination of the worlds largest spenders on engineering design, such as Airbus, Boeing, Nissan, and GE. Nissans charismatic CEO Carlos Ghosn has even coined a term for itfrugal engineeringand has been endorsing the engineered-in-India model to whoever cares to listen.

Yet, despite acknowledging and respecting Indias capability in engineering, most product makers have shied away from getting end-to-end products designed in the country. A superficial explanation has been that engineering is core to the business of these companies and it would take them some time to get comfortable with the idea of offshoring it to a far-off country.

That may not be entirely untrue as a fact, but it misses the real point. Companies like GE and John Deere have shown that doing complex engineering is not really the problem with India. The real challenge in India is to get the exterior design work that requires understanding of user behavior, cognitive models, and aesthetics. In short, the kind of things that are typically called the right brain work. In the late 60s, American psychobiologist and Nobel Prize winner Roger W Sperry discovered that the human brain has 2 very different ways of thinking. One (the right brain) is visual and processes information in an intuitive and simultaneous way, looking first at the whole picture and then the details. The other (the left brain) is verbal and processes information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole. Indians have proved their left brain capability beyond doubt and today no amount of complexity is considered undoable in India. But the creative design work is yet to be done in India commercially for the rest of the world. In fact, the exteriors of the poster boy of Indian engineering in general and frugal engineering in particular, the Tata Nanoas well as of its predecessor, Tata Indicawas designed by the I.DE.A Institute of Italy!

However, many argue that it is not Indias creative acumen that is the problem. Indias IT industryso far growing rapidly with low-hanging fruitshas never been serious about this. Sapient may not have the size and wherewithal to do it by itself, but a TCS or Wipro could probably do it. While they have hired user experience professionals of late, that is because of absolute necessity and not with any strategic intent.

Anyone who is familiar with Bollywood would never question Indias creativity, says a consultant in an outsourcing advisory firm. It is simply the IT industry which has so far not felt the need; else, they could have built that capability anywhere else, he argues adding that Indian companies today are not restricted by Indias geography.

The Aricent Experiment

Recently, Aricentthe PE firm-owned focused IT services firmannounced the formation of Idea-to-Market, a unit that will integrate its subsidiary Frog Designs 550 designers, researchers, strategists, mechanical engineers, and technologists with Aricents Mobile Devices and Solutions (MDS) and Experience Engineering (XE) groups, which has more than 1,000 software architects, developers, and quality assurance engineers. Frog Design is one of the most respected design houses in the US having worked in the consumer electronics, media & entertainment, medical devices, consumer products, and website design spaces. Its design portfolio includes as varied examples as Epson Portable Photo Viewers, HP Mini 1000 Mi edition netbook, HP Halo Telepresence, Microsoft Windows XP and Media Player, HENK hand luggage as well as a host of products in the medical electronics space. It also works in the brand and packing space. Aricent, so far focused on telecom, is Indias second largest telecom software company. Frog Design came to Aricent through common PE parentage but so far, the two companies had worked as two independent entities converging only at the absolute top level. Idea-to-Market is the first attempt to combine the creative with the analytical.

The integrated structure will enable creative and consulting teams to work hand-in-hand with software delivery teams on product and service innovations across multiple industries including communications, energy, retail, and healthcare. The teams will be based in locations in the US, India, China, and Europe, said a release from the company. Aricents Business Technology Consulting (BTC) group, which identifies market opportunities and assesses the business impact of emerging technologies for clients, is also part of the new unit.

In short, Idea-to-Market is exactly what the doctor ordered for the product design space in India. Can it really produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? That is the intent, says Tim Leberecht, the chief marketing officer of Aricent and Frog Design. Tim, till recently, headed marketing for Frog and by his own admission is still learning the IT services industry.

Says Doreen Lorenzo, president of Frog Design, who is leading the Idea-to-Market business unit as executive vice president and general manager of Aricent, The new business unit will strengthen our ability to help our clients consistently deliver this kind of innovation, while at the same time maximize operational efficiency, shorten time-to-market, and reduce overall product development lifecycle costs. Lorenzo continues to report to CEO Sudip Nandy. For Aricent, this means entering the non-telecom space for the first time.

We know it is a new experiment and that is why we are excited, says Leberecht, who is now making frequent India trips where most of the companys engineers are based. One of the items on his agenda is also about exploring the Indian market. Frog has a design studio in China which caters primarily to the local market. Will Frog soon have a studio in India? Leberecht is non-committal but says that it does not matter as long as the team can deliver the value to the client.

The long-term intent of Aricent is also to use the relationship to take its other offerings to the clients, and use it as a diversifying strategy.

If this experiment works, more and more Indian IT and engineering services firms would probably venture out to offer the value proposition of an end-to-end design. In that sense, it is an important development to watch.

Shyamanuja Das
shyamanuja@cybermedia.co.in