SolidWorks/Dassault Systèmes--Betting Big on India
Published on : Tuesday 30-11--0001
How the SolidWorks/Dassault Systèmes strategy is unfolding in India in the era of Platform with Simplicity.
To the uninitiated, SolidWorks is a solid modelling computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) program. One of the 11 group companies of Dassault Systèmes, SolidWorks primarily works with manufacturing companies to help them design and engineer their products in 3D. At the recent SolidWorks World 2019 convention in Dallas, USA, an important announcement was the launch of 3DExperience.Works, which brings SolidWorks to Dassault Systèmes’ 3DExperience Platform.
Speaking on the development, Suchit Jain, Vice President (Strategy and Business Development), SolidWorks, Dassault Systèmes, says, “From the SolidWorks perspective we always talk about doing things with simplicity. Our background DNA is smaller customers and though today we have over 300,000 customers and 6 million users globally, ranging from one bench shops to companies with thousands of engineers. Our roots are in simplicity – the simple way of doing things. That’s what 3DExperience.Works is all about. The strategy is to take all the powers of the Dassault Systèmes, simplify them and offer that to the users. Platform is the way to grow.” Jain has been directly working with SolidWorks since 2001, but his association with the ecosystem dates back to 1995 from his early days in the industry.
If education was always important in the SolidWorks scheme of things – the company has a strong association with educational institutions globally – so are the startups. SolidWorks has been associated with over 3,000 hardware startups globally during the last 3 years through the SolidWorks for Entrepreneurs programme by offering software for 1 year, training, and co-marketing resources at no cost, also connecting them with VCs. One third of these startups have ended up buying the software creating a win-win situation. With this kind of response – the company gets 300-400 applications per month – SolidWorks expects to end 2019 with double the number of startups in its Entrepreneurs programme.
So what is the situation in India? “The programme for startups in India is similar to what is done globally. As of now we are working with 21 incubators in India and the number of startups is about 300 – all in hardware, since product manufacturing is what we concentrate on – and we provide them end-to-end support, with a dedicated person to oversee that. Secondly we also support those start-ups outside the incubators who apply for the Entrepreneurs programme and the India-specific applications come to our team. After checking with the applicant company and due approval, we assign a reseller to that company who then follows up. This is important as the job of the reseller is to educate them about the product and provide the necessary support,” said P M Ravikumar, Sr Director, SolidWorks India. Like the global experience, successful startups once they come out of the incubator become customers of the company. Last year there were 9 such cases in India.
In India SolidWorks has 38 Channel Partners across the country. In terms of the number of persons, there are close to 250 sales executives and 400 technical specialists in the field forming a formidable presence on the ground. Besides there is a programme called MRE – Market Research Executives – operating at the reseller level. Each reseller through such MRE has a group of student interns covering all the industrial estates compiling a database of industries, following the classic traditional method. This database is in turn scrutinised for prospects and given to the sales team for follow up. The SolidWorks ecosystem is growing fast in India. According to Ravikumar, last year 1,500 new companies were added in India alone, and 15,000 worldwide.
At the moment, SolidWorks has 8,000 customers in India and the company also works with 1200 educational institutes – a crucial component that is introducing thousands of budding engineers to the company’s products and technologies. As for the industry segments, the top three comprise of Industrial Equipment – machine tools, machinery, etc., which is also the largest chunk at 40%; High Tech Industry – electronic and medical devices, IoT products, etc; and Consumer Goods. Besides, there is the significant segment of Engineering Services comprising engineering services providers and design services, etc. Then there are other players, e.g., Swaraj Mazda in the mobility sector – the entire fleet of their vehicles is designed in SolidWorks. These are the high growth areas for the company. SolidWorks has doubled its business in the last four years. “But Asia Pacific is a market growing in double digits, and within that India is growing in the higher double digits. Now we plan to double our growth in three years, by 2021,” Ravikumar sums up.
‘There is a lot of innovation going on in India’
- Bernard Charlès, Vice Chairman & CEO of Dassault Systèmes
“My heart is very close to India,” said Bernard Charlès, in response to the very first question posed to him during interaction with the Indian media delegation at the SolidWorks World 2019 event at Dallas. His uncle, the late Salesian priest Father Francis Guezou was the founder of Don Bosco College at Yelagiri Hills, Tamil Nadu, who regaled him with stories from India. “There are so many things we are doing in India and the market dynamics was very good last year with several large customers in the mainstream market. There is a lot of innovation going on in India, in several sectors,” he added. Charlès had earlier that day at the General Session given the example of Jaipur 3D City Project that went live last year. This digital project helps predict the impact of the infrastructure and development activities in real time, anticipating hurdles and dealing with the with changes, something that can be adopted as a model elsewhere.
Talking of customers, Charlès mentioned Mahindra & Mahindra, Ashok Leyland, Volvo Asia, HeroCorp and Aditya Birla group among others. While automobile was the sector that was an early adopter, now construction and engineering are among the big users if 3D design technologies. “The capacity of Indian companies to adopt the next generation platforms is quite strong,” he added. Talking about priorities Charlès listed the top two – first, to train their partners properly to serve the clients well, because the country is huge with big opportunities and companies that want to do higher quality manufacturing. The second is elevating the quality of the competencies in the workforce. Innovation is another aspect as well as the output of manufacturing, especially for Make in India. “So we are very focussed and getting good results with a growing customer base and also the number of partners, and of course our engagement with the education segment,” said Charlès.
While there is a lot of intellectual capacity and knowledge in India, what the country lacks is knowhow, pointed out Charlès, while emphasising this be not taken negatively. “When I talk about knowhow, it is the expertise to do highly sophisticated projects. We are building Competency Centres – for aerospace, automobiles and defence sectors – this is what is needed. Then we need to diffuse that access to knowledge – the talent is there, it has to be capitalised. I think this is the huge value that we can provide to the Indian manufacturing sector,” he said.
With over 2800 strong employee base in the country, most of them engaged in R&D across centres in Pune, Bangalore and now also in Chennai, for Dassault Systèmes, India is a very promising market with high growth potential, where it is possible to double the revenue every three years. The Competency Centres are a step in that direction. But as Charlès emphasised, in is not the numbers but the specialisation that matters.
Captions
Pix1: (L-R) P M Ravikumar, Sr Director, SolidWorks India and Suchit Jain, Vice President (Strategy and Business Development), SolidWorks
