Prabhakar Bendre, Senior Vice President - Manufacturing Business IT, KPIT Cummins Infosystems Ltd., talks about the Current and future trends in PLM, The Market size for PLM and for CAD CAM software, How PLM and MES help organizations during the Slow down and the Growth and future operation plans of the company.1. Could you please tell us about the services offered by KPIT Cummins? Which segment of the Industry do you focus on for your services? What are your core competencies in addressing this segment?
KPIT Cummins is a global IT consulting and specialist solutions partner to manufacturing corporations with focus on automotive, hi-tech and industrial verticals. We engage with our customers to combine technology and process expertise to help them bring products faster to their target markets. As leaders in our space we co-create domain-intensive technology solutions to help companies become efficient, integrated and innovative manufacturing enterprises. We currently partner with 100+ global Manufacturing corporations including 50+ OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), Tier 1s and semiconductor companies.
Our services span across product engineering, application development, technology consulting, Enterprise IT, Business Intelligence and specialized BPO/KPO. We are SAP channel partners and we are consulting partners for Business Objects.
We are premium members of AUTOSAR and member of JASPAR. We are one of the very few SPICE® level 5 certified companies in India.
2. Which are the PLM platforms you work with?
The PLM practice at KPIT Cummins is fast emerging as a comprehensive provider of digital manufacturing solutions to companies in the area of automotive, hi-tech and industrials verticals. We deliver end-to-end PLM Implementation services that include Solution Architecting, Deployment, Integration, Data Migration (from ERP/ Legacy Systems), Maintenance and Support. These services are primarily offered on three platforms namely РEnovia, Windchill and Oracle Agile. We have also partnered with Dassault Syst̬mes to deliver pre-configured Enovia implementation templates for Indian automotive and Industrial manufacturers. We have a partnership with Oracle India to sale and implement Agile PLM tool
3. How will the PLM and MES help organizations during this Global Economic Slow down?
Today companies are facing pricing pressure from the customers. At the same time to maintain profitability they have to reduce costs and increase service levels. Manufacturers are thus exploring opportunities to run their people-intensive operations from countries that offer significant cost arbitrage. The design teams are distributed across geographies and they need a common information platform to collaborate on a real-time basis. PLM and MES address these challenges, ensuring the products get to the market faster – while complying with stringent quality norms.
PLM and MES represent the fast emerging manufacturing concept of Digital manufacturing, a process / tool to design, validate and establish the POC for a new product, the manufacturing process and equipment required. It does this by way of translating the design data into virtual manufacturing process. A process that includes a detailed plan, assembly definition, assembly line design, plan for manufacturing cells, workstations, associated quality measurement systems, operating instructions and necessary documentation.
This allows flexibility and adaptability to operations such that processes can be shifted / switched dynamically to respond to the market conditions and opportunity in real time.
To help realize the full benefits of digital manufacturing investments, manufacturers need to integrate production systems across the organization, from design to quality monitoring. This encompasses integration of enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM), manufacturing execution systems (MES) and Shop Floor Control systems, to ensure seamless transmission of design information to the manufacturing line. This helps customers streamline and globalize their processes faster, facilitating them to become efficient, integrated and innovative enterprises.
4. What are the new services and market verticals on the radar of the Company?
Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is the next logical extension of our services portfolio. Faced with dynamic market changes and competitive threats, industrial manufacturers are broadening their focus from execution within a single facility/factory to manufacturing operations management across the supply network. As a result, Best-in-Class manufacturers are more likely to implement Manufacturing Execution System at their locations to:
1. Use automated data collection in conjunction with data historians and manufacturing analytics.
2. Standardize Key Performance Indicator measurement, optimization and exception handling across the enterprise.
3. Link operational metrics with financials and provide real time role based visibility to decision makers.
4. Use Plant floor automation (PFA), Quality Management Systems (QMS), Manufacturing Intelligence (MI), and Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS).
At KPIT Cummins, we partner with global manufacturers of Construction & Farming equipment, Mining & Power machinery and Machine tools. With MES we address the customers’ operation issues thus enabling them to optimally plan, schedule, sequence, execute, and monitor all their manufacturing processes, achieve on time delivery, Increase Overall equipment effectiveness, institutionalize lean Six Sigma processes, monitor production to drive continuous improvement, reduce labor costs and to achieve higher profits and marketplace wins.
5. Who are your major clients in India and abroad?
We work with leading automotive OEMs, Tier 1s and semiconductor companies globally.
6. Continental India recently inaugurated its Technical Center in Bangalore. Could you please tell us about your alliance with the Continental Technical center?
We would not be able to comment on this.
7. What are your growth plans and future operation plans of the company?
Since we articulated our Go-to-Market strategy and indentified focus verticals we have experienced significant traction for our services and delivery models. We have acquired leading automotive OEMs, Tier 1s and semiconductor companies as customers. We would continue to deepen our engagement with these customers and would explore opportunities for joint project development and co-creation of IP.
Our growth has been encouraging and we have done 5 acquisitions in the last six years. We continue to look for opportunities that allow us to strengthen our positioning in delivering services to manufacturing companies in our focus verticals. But our focus of growth is largely organic and focused on higher value generating solutions for our customers.
8. How do you differentiate your company, compared to other players offering PLM products and services?
In the current economic scenario manufacturers are looking at making investments in solutions that ensure quicker Returns on Investment, reduced cost of ownership and long-term business benefits. Our PLM service delivery methodology ensures that customer imperatives are met with customized solutions. Following are the core differentiating factors between services by KPIT Cummins and other providers:
1. Domain expertise: we have deep domain knowledge and understanding of the three core verticals namely Automotive, Hi-tech and industrials.
2. Integration capability: we have the capability to offer solutions that integrate PLM with MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) and ERP.
3. Well Defined PLM implementation Methodologies - Customers leverage PLM implementations based on methodical approach using pre-configured templates, that reduce implementation time and costs
9. Could you please tell us about the current and future trends in PLM?
There are few broad trends in PLM:
1. The use of PLM authoring tools such as CAD-based solid modeling – by domestic Indian companies - which is already widespread; the need now is more for collaborative product life management solutions.
2. In case of Global MNC companies, leading engineering companies such as ABB, Volvo, Chrysler, and GM are setting up engineering centers here in India and are looking at partnering with companies like KPIT to expand their design capacity. These companies are also looking at starting captive design capability.
3. The other trend seen is that domestic manufacturers who were earlier India focused are now going global. Take for instance Bharat Forge, which has emerged as the second largest forging company in the world. It has expanded aggressively overseas. Therefore the kind of solutions these companies need have to be of global standards and not just product-focused but also increasingly process-focused.
4. Most of the Customers are looking at pre-configured solutions that reduce implementation time and result in quicker Returns on Investments.
5. Integration with MES and ERP systems is emerging as a critical success factors for manufacturers.
10. What is the market size for PLM and for CAD CAM software globally and in India
1. The overall PLM market grew at a healthy clip of 10% CAGR, even amid global economic turmoil, thanks to emerging geographic and industry growth, increased need to better understand customer needs and manage portfolios of products, and global product development. We believe these trends will continue and that the market will expand at a 9% five-year CAGR, resulting in a $20B market by 2012
2. Globally, the market size for CAD-authoring tools is a bigger pie of approximately $20 billion, while collaborative product data management or process-oriented tools have a market size of close to $8-10 billion. PLM market size in India is estimated at around $100m to $250m and is growing rapidly.
3. However, the demand for collaborative tools is growing much faster at 15-20 percent per annum, while the growth of CAD-authoring tools is slower at 7 percent.
4. This is in keeping with the trend of increasing interest in Digital Manufacturing tools as more companies go global.
11. What is KPIT Cummins' market share for these services in India?
Digital Manufacturing is at a nascent stage in Indian industry. The companies over the last 2-3 years have been slow adopters of this technology. However with the current economic volatility has made it compelling for the companies to consider and adopt virtualization, PLM, cPDM (Collaborative Product Data Management) as tools to reduce costs, optimize processes and ensure zero-defect delivery.
We have been closely working with manufacturing companies and in the last 6-8 months we have observed a significant rise in demand for PLM, MES and similar collaborative technologies. Companies are exploring opportunities to leverage operational benefits of these tools for their business spread across multiple geographies. Thus we see significant increase in the companies’ acceptance for these tools however it would be too early to comment on the on the actual share of KPIT Cummins.
