Vivek Marwaha, Director Marketing, PLM, Siemens Industry Software India, talked to Prashant L Rao about the state of digital manufacturing in the country, how the PLM market was shaping up and areas where it was growing
Within PLM, what are the areas that are growing?
When you look at CAD/CAM/CAE, it’s not growing that fast but broad-based PLM—what we refer to as Digital Lifecycle Management (DLM)—that’s growing pretty quickly. Digital manufacturing is also growing quickly, although it is doing so from a low base.
CAD is pretty mature now and anyone who’s been using CAD for a while has generated a certain threshold value of data, which needs to be managed and organized in such a way that it becomes accessible to the right person at the right time. For that, you need to have a PDM system and that’s where DLM comes into the picture. Digital manufacturing is more about point solutions. While it’s an integrated suite, there are specific point applications within the suite that are being deployed. One of the key apps here is Plant Design Optimization, which is about managing and organizing your assembly line and plant starting with the layout.
In terms of industry sectors, is it still mostly automotive/aerospace that’s buying these solutions?
Automotive is the leader in terms of adoption. It’s cascading down to the supply chain—tier 2 and 3 players are also using the technology. Then there’s aerospace & defense (R&D and production). You have defense programs being managed by DRDO Labs and other agencies as well as the aerospace R&D and production. There’s the ‘engineered to order’ niche within the space of machinery manufacturing. You have heavy engineering, engineered to order goods manufacturers like BHEL, L&T, Crompton Greaves etc who use these solutions. Then we have mid-sized companies engaged in machinery manufacturing for specific verticals—textiles, construction, printing etc. Engineering services providers are a huge market and they are moving up the value chain. Earlier, they were doing elementary work. You have captive R&D centers and joint ventures and they are all big users of our technology. Then there are the Indian service providers.
We also see a lot of traction in the education & research community. Engineering colleges are looking at our tools in order to expose their students to our technologies. E.g. We go to a university and establish a Center of Excellence, which acts as a nodal point for the enablement of all colleges in the catchment area and trains faculty etc.
How has the availability of lots of cheap compute power influenced PLM?
CAD is the starting point and the extent and volume and richness of the information could vary. Then you have design validation. CAD is compute intensive but it’s more graphics intensive. Simulation is far more compute intensive with multiple What Ifs so that you can eliminate prototypes at the digital stage etc. Demand for compute cycles is very high in this area. PLM is much like any other enterprise application in terms of sizing and architecture; in fact, it’s slightly more demanding than ERP since the file sizes are huge. 15 years ago, the demands on the underlying computing platform were enormously high. While we have jacked up the power of our tools, we have consciously worked towards optimizing the resource requirements for running those applications.
Has there been a shift in terms of the underlying platforms?
15 years back it used to be only Unix/RISC machines. Today you see entry-level workstations, which are slightly more powerful than a routine desktop, running CAD applications. Likewise, with PLM we started off with Oracle and Unix and now we also have Windows and SQL Server etc.
CAD is mostly on Windows now. For some of our applications we are longer developing them on some Unix variants. When it comes to PDM/PLM it’s a mix. Many large enterprises are still on Unix/Oracle. Some of the new mid-sized to large adoptions are fine with the Windows-SQL Server combination.
