TVS Motors Lends Pace To Design Process With Adobe Solns

TVS Motor Company is a well-recognised name in the two-wheeler market in India. A flagship company of the TVS Group, the manufacturing firm also competes in the global two-wheeler space.

Product Development Challenges

As a result of the company’s emphasis on new and domestic product development, its New Products Introduction (NPI) team, which comprises approximately 300 engineers, releases six to 10 new products annually to address the broad-based requirements of the Indian market in particular. Due to the nature of its business, which requires extensive collaboration for sharing design blueprints among engineers, foreign-based technology partners and domestic suppliers, TVS Motors was facing a number of challenges. The complex chain of activities involved in the design and production process entailed printing and sharing of a large volume of paper-based documents. “Sharing and mailing designs was a cumbersome process that took 18 to 30 days, substantially lengthening collaboration, feedback loops, and turnaround times,” says Richard Gomez, General Manager, NPI/ PLM, TVS Motor Company.

“In a predominantly paper-based environment, production engineers had to wait for hard copies of drawings before commenting on them and sending them to suppliers across the country or abroad via courier. Integrating communication across the different functions involved in the new product development process was proving to be a challenge and was hampering productivity. Keeping in mind the highly competitive nature and rapid growth of the two-wheeler industry in India, we needed to develop products much faster than ever before and this whole process of sharing and collaboration among various partners was anything but conducive to our business,” says Gomez**.**

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IT Saves the Day

Excellence in product manufacturing often calls for sustained innovative efforts and investment in relevant technologies and tools. Hence, the management of TVS thought of investing in a paper-less collaboration tool and finally zeroed in on Adobe Acrobat 3D and Adobe PDF.

If we stop here for a moment, one thought that naturally occurs in today’s age of cloud services is, why would a CIO invest in a proprietary technology when there are tonnes of free collaboration tools such as Google Docs available online? “Security is an issue with such tools. Adobe Acrobat 3D not only offers a secured environment to share design blueprints but it also integrates with AutoCAD, 3D CAD, ProE designs, and other format design source materials. Design blueprints are mission-critical to the manufacturing process and you can’t afford to have their integrity compromised in an unsecured environment,” says Sandeep Mehrotra, Director-Sales, Adobe India.

Benefits Reaped

With the installation of Adobe Acrobat 3D and Adobe PDF, any employee with a desktop or laptop PC can now view high-end CAD and other complex engineering drawings using Adobe Reader. With Acrobat 3D, TVS Motor can integrate complex engineering designs with everyday business processes and convert ProE, 3D, and AutoCAD designs to Adobe PDF format with ease.

“Improving efficiency was one of our biggest challenges. The commenting and editing features available in Acrobat 3D enable production engineers to share feedback quickly with other team members down the hierarchy. Even our suppliers use this feature extensively now,” says Gomez.

The entire collaboration process for sharing of design blueprints now takes just two to seven days. Digital sharing of documents has primarily facilitated this reduction in processing time. The PLM solution automatically triggers collaboration once a new workflow is designed. The documents are immediately sent out for review and approval and the whole process moves smoothly from there on.

In the future, TVS tentatively to integrate more modules into this tool like ConnectNow, which is an online Web conferencing system meant for desktop-based collaboration.