EDS Technologies spoke to Mr. N . Venkatesan, General Manager- Engineering Services of ITC Infotech, a 100% subsidiary of ITC Limited, a $3.6 billion diversified conglomerate.

We asked Mr. Venkatesan, who carries with him, years of vast experience in the CAD- CAM & PLM industry a few thoughts on why ITC has adapted PLM, his views on the Manufacturing Industry, global offshoring trends, India as a Design & Development outsourcing hub and overall vision.

ITC Infotech is a $64 million IT services company with offerings spanning across the BFSI, Manufacturing, Travel & Hospitality and CPG verticals. The key services offered range from ERP, CRM, PLM, Engineering Services, MES, Infrastructure services among many others.

The simplest reason to implement PLM is for reducing the time to market for new product introduction. The other benefits are of course cost reduction, traceability, reuse of global product data, integration of globally spread design and manufacturing facilities, right information for quicker decision making and quality improvements.

But PLM is yet to become a major phenomenon as compared to ERP, SCM or CRM since the measurement of business value from implementing PLM is largely based on abstract parameters. There is a need to construct robust ROI models for measuring the success of PLM implementations, until this happens, the adoption of PLM will be slower than touted.

India is still away from becoming a manufacturing hub for global companies. Even the many that are sourcing are buying minor components and sub-systems and not yet full fledged products and systems. But India can and is on the verge of becoming a design and development hub because of the vast engineering pool available in the country.

PLM service providers in India are implementing large projects for global customers due to the large customization portion involved in such implementations which can be offshored. Experience in such large implementations coupled with the emergence of India as a key engineering services destination bodes well for the industry. A stronger process and quality orientation will be the keys to this industry’s success.

The current indicators point to the country becoming a destination for design and development activities for global organizations. Several global companies are either setting up captive centers or outsourcing their design activities to India based engineering services providers. The engineering services providers too are becoming proactive in setting up offshore centers coupled with near shore facilities. Again process and quality orientation is important to provide confidence to these global organizations to set up or outsource such activities.

Overall, India is on the verge of becoming a global engineering hub – for design and development of products, components and sub-systems and maybe sometime later for manufacturing as well. This is observed both in the mechanical and electronic oriented industries. The manufacturing as well as the services community can look forward to a period of intense activity and it is better for us to be prepared to take on the challenge by improving the 3P’s – proficiency, process and practice.

I would like to add that ITC Infotech has received exceptional support from EDS Technologies in its initiative to broad base its services. Karthikeyan and his team are always available whenever we have a problem and EDS has been proactive in helping us.