( Although I am just a undergraduate student pursuing my engineering degree my short stint at the CAD/CAM center of a MNC and my personal interest in this field has made me voice my opinion about this sector.)
Indian companies have made their mark in almost every field that they have ventured into be it software, manufacturing, service sector, just anything. And one such field worth mentioning Is the CAD/CAM industry. Now the prowess of this sector can only be acknowledged by the fact that today the industry has gone ahead and brought its solutions to the common man with mosquito mats, plastic buckets or even cola bottles being designed by CAD/CAM tools. Today this industry has evolved as an industry with a 250 crore market growing at a rate of 25% per annum. Studies show that India is slowly becoming the back-end design house for many foreign manufacturing players due to its cheap skilled labour advantage. The potential of this market can only be realized from the fact that the manufacturing sector spends about Rs. 3000 crore annually on the IT services i.e. in the CAD/CAM field. With such an environment for growth surely this sector has to make further inroads.
However one serious problem that this sector faces is the dearth of trained man power. To quote Mr.Bhardwaj, senior vice president, Hero Global Design, “In India, we have about 70,000,00 technologists, but there are only 2,300 designers per million, which in turn shows the lack of supply and generation of product designers”. To make up for this lack of skilled manpower many companies have many manufacturing companies have signed contracts with foreign service providers like PTC, Dassault Systems etc.
Seeing this as an excellent opportunity many CAD/CAM training centers (working mostly on cheap pirated softwares) have come up throughout the length and breadth of this country. The quality of students being churned out of these institutes varies. These institutes help the candidates in gaining knowledge about the interface and environment of CAD softwares but not the design logic. So the candidates coming out are suitable for the low segment jobs but since the very essence of “design logic” is missing in them they fail in serving in the high segment area.
The only solution to the demands of this industry on the rise where quality is a pre-requisite is the formation of a standard curriculum to be taught in the technical institutes of the country. Such a curriculum should be software independent (unlike those being taught by the software companies like PTC etc.), teaches the process of design, analysis and manufacturing. Such courses can be short but should be intensive and more productive. Another solution can be the establishment of specialized educational institutes in collaboration with the big players of the sector and the government (like the National Institute of Design) which caters to the rapidly expanding sector.
Some big players that are dominating the Indian market today are:
P.T.C (Parametric Technical Corporation): Pro/ENGINEER is the world’s leading mechanical computer aided design (MCAD) software.
SolidWorks Corporation: A Dassault Systems company that develops and markets production 3D CAD solutions for the Windows platform.
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