Engineering Outsourcing - No longer just creating 3D models or making drawings

Engineering Outsourcing - No longer just creating 3D models or making drawings

The main objective of this paper is to highlight the evolving change of customers’ perspective on engineering outsourcing and narrate the story on how TCS responded to this and became successful. This paper highlights couple of projects as examples. It highlights the typical industry needs in product engineering and narrates how such needs are effectively met. The various competencies identified and developed by TCS and experiences on similar lines are described in this paper. This paper also summarises the changed needs of the customer and key factors for success in engineering outsourcing.

Keywords

New Product Development (NPD), Competencies, Dimensional Management, Value Analysis and Value Engineering (VA/VE), Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA), Design for Manufacturability, Assembly and Serviceability (DFX)

Introduction - The change has arrived

A decade back, when engineering outsourcing was still in its nascent stage, the work offshored to India predominantly involved creating digital models and drawings. The design activity was not outsourced to India because of various reasons such as concerns with regard to intellectual property, lack of resources with domain knowledge and above all lack of understanding on what really works with outsourcing. The effective collaboration and coordination between the service receiver and service provider were the keys to success in this model and the time spent on the same became a matter of concern to those who were interacting with service providers. As a trend, companies started looking at solutions with increased ownership from service providers to move out from day-to-day monitoring and reviewing of the project. The modelling and detailing encompassed only a portion of the bigger picture (piece-meal type of outsourcing) and companies clearly sensed the need to shift to a bigger chunk of work where increased ownership on the design had to be demonstrated by the service providers. The customers started seeing the need to realise “Value arbitrage” from the engagement to bring competitive products to the market with less overall program spending. The ability of service providers to understand the customer product lines is becoming an important factor in choosing the right service provider.

The new journey of TCS adopting the change

The Engineering and Industrial Services (EIS) unit of TCS observed the evolving change in the needs of the customer and aligned its internal strategy to build series of new competencies to support the customer. The set of competencies required to support customers in the complete product development program involved working at several layers apart from modelling and detailing. The journey never stopped with just product design. TCS increased the focus and developed a whole range of peripheral competencies around product design such as Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE), Digital Manufacturing, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Technical Publications, Sourcing and Manufacturing services, Plant solutions, Integrated Asset Management, Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics and Geospatial solutions such that all elements of a product life cycle starting from product design, manufacturing through post sales can be addressed in a global engineering environment.

The new competencies helped TCS successfully complete several product design and development projects. For example, Industrial Machinery group of EIS has been providing product design services to power machinery, material handling, and earth moving sector. This group has completed several projects and offered services in the broader spectrum of product design and development programs to global customers. Outlined here are two such examples.

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