Has the Coalition Era Begun in CAD for Tooling?
World’s biggest democratic carnival will be on this summer with the largest secular democratic country ‘India’ going to elections. The 2014 carnival is already an ideal package of infotainment due to the emergence and popularity of 24/7 news channels, and social networking sites. Unprecedented growth of smart phones in this market has made every news and events available to Aam Aadmi (common man).
The last 3 central governments were successful coalition governments completing 15 years of coalition governance in Indian democratic history. It seems the Indian politics moved away from bipolar, tripolar, quadripolar fight forever.
Coalition governments are here to stay and every one has started to accept this change. One must be thinking how is this related to the industry we are in. Well, has the Coalition era begun in software product Market? partially, the coalition dynamics are becoming more relevant and visible in CAD for tooling segment. The electorate in CAD for tooling segment ie customers are having multiple CAD software’s in their IT assets along with manpower having multiple skill sets. Certain products have been able to establish niche market leadership at select verticals.
The emergence of independent CAD for tooling and ISV (Independent software vendors) products unfurled the coalition era across the 3DCAD system in MCAD. Few of ISV products have converted the unique domain functionalities into software features and at certain geographies ISV products have larger recognition and brand recall than the OEMs.
The CAD for tooling ISV solutions has got peer club with electrical, plant solutions, PDM, civil, architectural and cabling solutions to name a few.
CAD for tooling products comes at the last stage of NPD (New Product Development) but takes the first line of fire. These tools propagate the automation, hence reducing human intervention on redundant tasks. The fundamental question that arises here is – does the product actually do what it propagates or is it just a talking point similar to coalition politics ‘ playing to the gallery (i.e media)’.
The product needs to exist in multi and diverse IT environments. The market leadership will be with products which adhere to coalition realities. Following are some of the coalition compulsions (readers can substitute them with regional parties, national parties, article 370, common minimum program, corporate funding, Women’s reservation or any other terms of current politics):-
ERP/SCM (Supply Chain Management) – ERP’s exist with every organisation in one or the other form. The changes in CAD bring direct impact on BOM (Bill of Material). The product needs to provide options to integrate with ERP / SCM solutions with the least investment than providing flashy reports to generate quotes or RFP’s/RFQ’s and parking customer’s critical data at islands which is not integrated with any of enterprise applications.
PDM (Product Data Management) – CAD for tooling is either recipient or creator of most of the critical NPD data. The CAD data needs to be integrated with leading PDM tools, this will help customer to attain ROI rather than few automation features which just aim to reduce the number of mouse clicks.
ESP (Engineering Service Provider) – The popularity of the product with ESP’s will help the customers avail the on demand expertise during business crisis.
Product Ambassadors – Special category of people, who come with domain expertise coupled with software expertise, are known in the market as domain consultants or subject matter experts. These people enable the customers to train their employees at optimum price and nearest geography so, that customers get optimum ROI from the same set of employees.
CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) – No NPD is possible without using relevant CAE solutions. The CAD for tooling solution needs to provide direct CAD translations with leading CAE tools. This will help the customers to enhance their offerings and protect the IP.
Compliance- The product should adhere to compliance requirements of the industry. Customers cannot afford to have multiple solutions to manage the similar compliance requirements and complicating the entire process.
CAD partners or resellers- The products have acquired market share and dominance , only when their partners have become successful.
The product which shows disrespect to coalition dharma may remain like the communist ideology in a capitalist democratic country. Customers now seem to be waiting for disrupting technology to bring in a different perspective like the much talked about Aam Admi phenomena.
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.
