No ducking calls

Chitra Phadnis

FOR Dynamatic Technologies, the fifth-largest producer of hydraulic gear pumps globally, whose operations range from designing to building a variety of products, any IT solution would have been inadequate. The company had already automated its operations, including product development, and also had an ERP in place.

``But PTC's Windchill seemed to be made just for us,'' says Udyant Malhoutra, Managing Director and President, Dynamatic, though it took the company nearly a year to decide on it.

Windchill offers to be for product development what MRP is to manufacturing, streamlining the design and the engineering process. Dynamatic, whose focus on R&D is reflected in its target this year of filing 35 patents, caters to the manufacturing, automotive, aerospace segments.

Windchill, a solution for ``collaborative product commerce'' (CPC), is based on the Web, and allows people in various locations to collaborate on the design and development of a product. This could include employees, various departments within the organisation, suppliers, and customers.

In effect, all these various stakeholders can contribute inputs during the entire life-cycle of product development.

This could help avoid a situation where the R&D department worked for months on a ``perfect'' design, only to have it rejected later by the finance department, the production engineer, the marketing guys or even the customer.

Windchill easily integrates with the ERP and the post-product development cycle can begin without duplication of data or time loss.

There are other benefits, which PTC probably never had in mind, says Malhoutra. As a user, Dynamatic discovered that Windchill was a hard taskmaster when it came to processes. Once Dynamatic had fed its own process into the solution, there was no way it could take shortcuts.

``Most companies have an ISO or some quality standard in place that runs on the rule which says `follow the process and quality will follow'. However very few of us actually do that.'' ``Take the case of approvals. Typically in a company, a meeting would be called of the four people needed to give their approval. If the fourth person was missing, or not available that day, the general feeling would be to let him go and carry on anyway. Only later, when some trouble happened, the team would find out that the fourth person's contribution could have made an important difference, saving time, money and problems.''

``The Windchill system is designed such that every person's contribution has to come in, without which the system just doesn't move forward,'' says Malhoutra.

Windchill being Web-based, it doesn't really matter if people are traveling or are in some other place, they can still participate.

For a company like Dynamatic which insists on making its alloys itself so that the quality of the final product is in no way compromised, this rigidity is only an added attraction.

The feature also brings in a greater amount of accountability. The CEO in the head office can monitor the system and find out exactly where the system has suddenly halted. ``It prevents all forms of `passing the buck','' says Malhoutra with a grin.

As for cost savings, Malhoutra doesn't even attempt to guess. ``You cannot put a figure to quality, customer satisfaction, and time to market.''

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