1. Briefly tell us about your Activities in India
The Indian manufacturing space has witnessed an accelerated integration of technology and automation and Hexagon has dived in headfirst to try and provide intelligent ‘phygital’ (physical + digital) solutions to enable this. Our solutions span industries such as Ground vehicles, aerospace, Systems Dynamics and ADAS, Acoustics, CFD, Machinery, Manufacturing and Education.
As a global leader in sensor, software and autonomous solutions, our focus has been on putting data to work to boost efficiency, productivity, and quality across industrial, manufacturing, infrastructure, safety, and mobility applications. Our technologies are shaping urban and production ecosystems to become increasingly connected and autonomous ensuring a scalable, sustainable future.
Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence provides technologies that enable manufacturers to improve quality and productivity. Its solutions for design and engineering, production and metrology allow customers to work with speed and confidence, shaping smart change in manufacturing to create agile, data-driven processes and enable smart factories.
Last year, we announced our collaboration with CMTI for a Smart Manufacturing Centre for innovation and incubation. MSMEs can use the facility to explore smart manufacturing, thereby giving them the confidence to go back and use these technologies in their factories. This is certainly a game-changer for us since it allows us to play a role in furthering India’s goal of increasing GDP contribution from manufacturing. In addition, our ‘Your challenge, our solution’ campaign was a successful one where we solved challenges thrown to us by our customers to show them how our technology can resolve their challenges. We have also taken some active steps to help shore up indigenous R&D in India’s defence sector by supporting the Atma Rakshit Bharat campaign.
2. How has Hexagon and its products helped the manufacturing industry….in the post Covid era?
COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation and forced companies to go digital while optimizing production processes. Manufacturers have been pushed to explore how operations can run smoothly even with skeletal staff.
This drove home the need to rethink planning and operations to ensure that infrastructure and services can run as efficiently and effectively as possible despite possible disruptions. Digital transformation initiatives can play a key role in the manufacturing industry’s recovery and renewal by optimizing the manufacturing process. In a connected digital world, functions such as design, PLM, production environments are connected. As the digital and physical worlds converge, it allows for the consolidation of data. As a result, each department becomes infinitely smarter. Insights from this data can translate to improved quality, greater productivity, lower costs, and sustainable designs.
As organizations seek to revamp their businesses for the post-COVID world, there is an opportunity to closely examine processes and relook at operations to optimize them for the future. Hexagon has enabled a number of organizations to deal with the restrictions the post-COVID era has brought, by putting data to work autonomously, to help businesses improve manufacturing processes, and measure outcomes. Hexagon has a bold vision for an autonomous future where business, industry and humanity sustainably thrive.
Our digital solutions have enabled organizations across industries, including construction, mining, manufacturing, R&D, to overcome the challenges that a digital-first world has imposed on their processes. Hexagon’s digitalization solutions have provided operators with a real-time view of installations without the need for physical site visits, thus reducing travel, helping to push down secondary carbon emissions, and limiting worker exposure to potentially harmful or risky industrial environments. Hexagon’s end-to-end integrated processes have eliminated the use of unintelligent data collection and drawings wherever possible. This has eliminated siloes of data between engineering, design, and fabrication, thus improving work processes and saving time.
3. Hexagon products and the synergy between them—citing a few case studies with examples
Hexagon offers sensor, software, and autonomous solutions. These solutions are aligned around the larger ecosystems that impact the functioning of organizations/industries. Our offerings empower autonomous, connected ecosystems to drive efficiency, productivity, quality, and safety. Hexagon has a unique set of five core competencies critical to fusing the physical and digital worlds and fully connecting and leveraging our customers’ data. When leveraged together, they add up to perhaps the most dynamic and powerful use of data through Smart Digital Reality. It’s what we aim to deliver with every solution.
Sensor solutions involve reality capture ad positioning, a category we’ve led for the past two decades. Design & simulation and location intelligence lead our software solutions. They are used to unlock the value of captured data and enable the ability to design, simulate and provide location intelligence for real-world scenarios – even before they’re built or occur. Our autonomous technologies add the power of machine learning, AI and edge computing, integrating learning and decision-making into any system to deliver solutions that adapt to dynamic environments and evolve as environments change (i.e., get smarter over time).
Among these, some of our innovations such as the industry-first hand-held picture-perfect imaging solution, on-site scanning and edge computation solution, and ground-penetrating radar solutions are disrupting entire industries.
Hexagon Capability Center India (HCCI) is the single largest R&D hub of Hexagon. As a leading metrology and manufacturing solution specialist, Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division offers expertise in sensing, thinking and acting on the collection, analysis and active use of measurement data. Our knowledge and experience give customers the tools – and the confidence – to increase production speed and accelerate productivity while enhancing product quality.
While industries have their own unique challenges and motivations, productivity is central to manufacturing success across the board. Manufacturers must find the right balance of speed, efficiency, cost and quality to ensure they maintain the right level of productivity. Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division combines technologies and ideas to enable this closed-loop manufacturing – developing solutions that solve challenging customer issues.
Our customer, ŠKODA AUTO developed an advanced automated inspection approach to gathering the rich data sets it needs to power smarter vehicle manufacturing. Another example is BOOSTER Precision Components, which reduced scrap by 20% using an intelligent machine control solution for tool correction.
4. What do you think is the Way forward—EV or autonomous vehicles
Electrification is the biggest disruption to the automotive industry in decades. It is challenging industry norms from consumer demand through to manufacturing operations and even sales models. New players are taking advantage of lower barriers to entry and gaining advantage from agile development techniques and emerging technologies. Just as electric vehicles (EVs) reimagine the concept of a vehicle, the industry must reimagine the way it operates to remain relevant in the electric world. EVs are predicted to represent a third of the automotive market by 2025.
Autonomous mobility doesn’t depend on a single technology. It requires whole ecosystems of different technologies and services working together in flawless harmony. Autonomous driving systems have seen stellar innovations, and vehicles can now be driven across diverse vehicle platforms and within complex environments, including live traffic on simple urban roads.
Be it EVs or autonomous vehicles, or electric-powered autonomous mobility, automotive innovation is proceeding at a rapid pace. Digitalization and optimization of manufacturing and design processes are key to driving new innovations and achieving sustainable mobility solutions in the foreseeable future.
5. What is your take on the Indian manufacturing sector and what role does Hexagon see itself playing??
The main focus of smart manufacturing technologies is to optimize factory productivity, and mainly deal with challenges summarized as the 4Ps: product, process, people, production. Each of these areas have parameters to be captured, in order to analyse, predict possible solutions and finally execute the appropriate remedial actions. The end goal is to achieve enhanced productivity, a reduction in breakdowns, and reproducibility of the developed solutions.
In India, the manufacturing landscape is largely dominated by micro small and medium (MSME) industries. In many such factories, one of the major challenges faced is the lack of awareness about the new smart manufacturing technologies, Industry 4.0 etc. Since challenges are often unique to a particular organisation, they require customised solutions. Unfortunately, most smart manufacturing solutions are not ready-to-use, and need to be customized based on specific industries, machines, and even to a specific individual’s needs.
Our partnership with CMTI is focused on addressing this. Hexagon will work with CMTI to establish a Smart Factory Demonstrator with a Digital Twin for Small & Medium Businesses with examples relating to CNC machining, sheet metal production and additive manufacturing. Employing Industry 4.0 / Smart Factory platforms, the Smart Factory Demonstrator showcases the latest manufacturing technologies for these industries. The Demonstrator will focus on solution architectures that are modular and configurable, enabling smaller businesses to experiment and scale with their needs. It includes a robust research and training platform that leverages part of the existing manufacturing infrastructure at CMTI.
6. In addition to its portfolio of standard catalogue products, Hexagon has the ability to deliver bespoke measuring solutions. Do you see a trend for customized measuring solutions increasing; as measuring systems become increasingly integrated into manufacturing?
Our CAD CAM (computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing) software portfolio enables manufacturers to generate, manage and optimize CNC machining toolpaths for more efficient production processes. Performing measurements with the same reference throughout all processes—from material reception to processing, assembly, inspection, and shipping—makes it possible to create products that match the design exactly and to guarantee product quality.
If even one person performs inaccurate measurements, product quality can be compromised. Should this lead to defective products being mixed in with good products, the result will be a worse yield. In addition, shipping defective products as finished products will lead to complaints from customers. In other words, it is essential that all members of an organization perform correct measurements throughout every step of the manufacturing process.
Hexagon’s metrology technologies capture quality data for measurement, positioning and inspection. They are the key bridge between the real and virtual worlds, bringing real-world data into the digital domain to power smarter manufacturing approaches. Our technology is helping manufacturers pioneer new manufacturing digitalization strategies that use quality data more effectively – informing the design and engineering processes and providing feedback to production.
Hexagon’s metrology portfolio includes all mainstream sensor technologies and metrology hardware including hand tools, coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), portable measuring arms, laser trackers and 3D optical scanners. We also develop an extensive range of 3D metrology software, CT analysis software and statistical process control (SPC) solutions, enabling manufacturers to easily capture real-world data and gain insights that support better decisions.
ABOUT Sridhar Dharmarajan
Sridhar Dharmarajan (DS) is the Executive Vice President & Managing Director – India, Manufacturing Intelligence division, Hexagon. In his role, he is responsible for India sales operations of the Metrology and Production Software portfolios, as well as MSC Software and Q-DAS. He also oversees the MSC Software Indo-Pacific regional business operations across India, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand.
He joined MSC Software Corporation in 2007 establishing the company’s first sales office in the Region. Over the past decade, he has built and retained high performing teams. He has been responsible for the company’s market leadership and 10x growth. Before MSC Software Corporation, between 2002-2006, Mr. Dharmarajan was responsible for successfully setting up the MatrixOne operations in India.
He is also a successful entrepreneur who has set up two companies – Bluefont Technologies and Pixtel communications (Pixtel was sold to Mindtek, Taiwan) in the early 2000’s. It is during this time Mr. Dharmarajan acquired an in-depth knowledge of setting up and running a software company end-to-end. Mr. Dharmarajan started his career with Wipro Infotech. After leaving Wipro, he was handpicked to be a part of a core team to establish SDRC (now Siemens PLM) in India. During his eight-year tenure at SDRC, he was the recipient of numerous technical and sales excellence awards and played a vital role in the success of SDRC in the country.
Mr. Dharmarajan has completed his MS in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is based in Bangalore and calls the Garden City his home.
