The Indian design service industry is expected to see a growth rate of 20.2% from 2007-2012. The country has been able to demonstrate this success over these years with its flexible and adaptable approach toward the evolving challenges and needs of the product designs especially in embedded system designs.
This ‘journey’ started many years ago when product companies around the world saw the cost advantages of the country’s design services as well as the availability of skilled manpower. Since then, many third party design services companies have evolved, and captive design centers of principals have been established in India.
With a close view on the trends in the industry, coupled with utilizing available resources, the embedded systems design or product design services in India have evolved from being labor intensive wherein the only advantage was lowering the cost of development, to a skill intensive outsourcing, in which the advantage was the availability of technically skilled engineering. This has helped companies worldwide to meet their objectives of lower cost of ownership, faster time-to-market, lower risks and reduced non-recurring expenditures (NREs) by working with Indian design centers.
Industry disaggregation
Over the last decade, the disaggregation of the electronic industry has resulted in product firms moving towards a horizontally oriented organization in which various activities in a Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC) - from identification of new market opportunities, detailed system specifications, development, manufacturing and assembly - are handled as distinct organizations. The complexity of embedded systems and the diverse extent of technologies to be mastered have forced electronic companies to focus on their core competence and acquire design services from elsewhere. In this scenario, the seamless integration of the various PDLC activities is a critical factor for the success of a program.
The Indian design services industry has positioned itself as a partner complementing the design activities of product companies participating anywhere and everywhere in a product development life cycle. Through handling several distinct services, Indian companies have been able to integrate design activities seamlessly with the main stream of the product development process.
Companies such as Wipro Technologies have participated in many such programs in which design complementing services have been successfully integrated with the mainstream.
Faster time-to-market
Faster time-to-market is an essential attribute in the product development life cycle. Product designers have to adopt a high degree of design reuse and leverage, and minimize re-invention to avoid lost opportunities in the market place. The increasing product complexity also does its part to impact faster design cycles. To this end, products are built over reusable components or modules. Indian design centers have proactively invested on their own to build such reusable components that can be applied into a product with minimum customization.
In addition, every product incorporates special functions from diverse technologies. Hence, in order to deliver products with stable performance and good quality, expertise over multiple technologies becomes important. Indian engineering service providers are able to bring in niche expertise on unique domains easily thanks to proactive investments and a wide customer base seeking such technologies.
Indian firms have been investing in multiple Centers of Excellence (COEs) that have charters to build both reusable solutions framework and expertise in emerging areas ahead of the curve. The Intellectual Property (IP) solutions thus created is offered as a business accelerator. Due to its diverse customer base, Wipro’s embedded systems group has COEs working on specialized solutions and capabilities in different areas including Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS), printing solutions, automotive infotainment and telematics, telemetry with medical devices, simulation framework, image processing and remote device management.
Accelerated product development
Accelerated product development life cycle is a corollary to faster time-to-market in a product generation process. Accelerating the product development process helps to achieve both cost and time advantages. Due to the strong need to maximize the returns on investments, product companies have been optimizing product development processes across the life cycle in a two-pronged approach – one for process optimization, and the other for design cycle optimization.
Adoption of agile and lean methods has given very good results especially in the software cycle of embedded product development. For product development involving hardware and mechanical design, a design correction cycle takes considerable time. Hence, design cycle optimization has helped accelerate the product development life cycle.
Enhanced front-loading experiments for functional verification using prototype parts help to freeze the design earlier with reasonable accuracy. Further, multiple design variants are tested at the same milestone to freeze the design based on best results. For example, to avoid multiple iterations of the design for EMI compliance, more than one design form is tested at every milestone.
Due to the rich experience gained in handling multiple product development requirements from worldwide customers, Indian engineering companies have evolved such best practices to accelerate product development. In a certain project, with three different design variants, Wipro was able to freeze a battery cover design within single design iteration in which there was a high probability of failure due to interference of the rotating battery cover with the product’s base cover. The entire product lifecycle was reduced by 30-40% than could be achieved using a conventional process. This results in significant cost savings compared with the cost of additional prototypes fabricated.
Aggregation in the value chain
Although many product companies have already adopted the open innovation model, an optimized product development process involves integration of solutions and services from diverse players who are not part of the development process. To come out with comprehensive solutions for the market, a product company needs to have familiarity with multiple vendors of hardware and software sub-systems. Given the need to divest non-essential functions, product companies are constantly looking for such service aggregation from outsourced partners.
For example, in the Point of Services (POS) industry, 50% of the POS devices market share is shared by at least 5 or 6 vendors. At the same time, the software solution vendors are quite fragmented. Indian design companies now play the role of aggregator of such solutions for its customers, and participate in the product generation cycle.
Availability of resources
To cope with increasing needs of new and versatile products, a huge pool of resources is required. Although design automation tools are available, qualified and talented pool of engineers and technical staff are required. India has a huge talent pool of engineers and technical graduates with almost 500,000 technical graduates being added each year. There are more than 2,000 colleges and 113 universities in the country with engineering colleges growing at the rate of 20% per year, and MBA colleges at the rate of 60% a year.
A product under development needs to be subjected to engineering and design validation cycle during the development process. This is to ensure the validity of the design intent, repeatability and consistency of performance. For an optimized process, the engineering function should be supported by a strong vendor base for fabrication of proof of concepts, prototypes and samples.
Over the years, Indian design centers have established excellent working models with vendors both locally and globally. For example, for a product development requirement, Wipro worked with vendors from Japan, China, Singapore and India to fabricate PCBs, plastic and sheet metal parts prototyping and tool fabrication. These parts were fabricated with selected vendors, and integrated and tested by the design team in India.
Over the last few years, Indian design centers, including Wipro, have matured the process of working with global vendors and aligning their deliverables to critical milestones and helping customers release products to market on time.
Summary
Indian firms such as Wipro have evolved an ODE (Original Design Engineering) model in which the firms take complete ownership of the engineering effort in a product development program. The ODE model helps product development companies across the globe by taking over the engineering effort, and working with leading manufacturers to provide winning products.
Additionally, the ODE partner can add value to the product development cycle by complimenting product design efforts with end-to-end solutions. With a global reach, broad domain expertise and deep technical strengths, research and development partners deliver fully optimized, integrated and transparent solutions.
As global OEM firms look at reducing costs and product development cycles, India is fast emerging as the new-age design hub. Today, the concept of a product is that it is developed in the US, designed in India, manufactured in China and sold in markets across the globe.
For offshore product development, India has emerged from being labor intensive to a skill intensive design hub and offering the best in terms of cost, schedule and quality toward success for customers.
You can reach Ganesan, M. at sundaram.ganesan@wipro.com
