Engineering services offered out of India, are following the IT pattern and getting more broad based. First came the multinationals, mostly global auto majors with their development and R&D units.
Then it was the turn of third-party engineering services firms to set up units in India. Most recently, Indian firms have started targeting local manufacturers to help them go global.
They first started by supporting units such as Delphi, Visteon and DaimlerChrysler in their development efforts. Now they are beginning to tap the booming automobile and aeronautical manufacturing sectors.
Quantech Global Services and Quality Engineering & Software Technologies (QUEST) are examples of this growing trend.
They are leveraging their India strategy on two trends: the high growth path of the economy and increasing trend among global companies to outsource manufacturing to India.
Mukesh Gandhi, founder and CEO of Quantech Global, said: "India and Asia Pacific offer tremendous business opportunity for engineering services firms. Our growth strategy is to continuously expand and bring design and engineering capabilities closer to customers to keep up swiftness to respond to their business and market requirements."
Quantech, the $30 million engineering services firm, plans to invest a further $3 million in its Bangalore delivery centre and will hire 300 engineers in addition to its Hyderabad centre, which employs around 200 professionals.
Quest, on the other hand, plans to add 350 engineers to the 550 they have in Bangalore.
Added Gandhi: "We see our Asian Technical Centre in Bangalore contributing significantly to revenues as our customer mandate for product design and development lies with the Indian team. Our goal is to position Quantech as a quality automotive engineering and design technology services provider."
Quest is focused on aviation in addition to automobiles. Aravind Melligeri, founder & president, said: "We see India as a tremendous opportunity for engineering services firms such as us. Our services include full system and component design, analysis support, field failure investigations and solutions, and custom design tool development. Besides Six Sigma, our experts in product design and e-engineering also use new methodologies such as design of experiments."
After gaining scale and momentum in their delivery centres in India, the engineering services firms are offering their services in India.
Melligeri said: "We are working closely with Hindustan Aeronautics and ISRO on some of their projects and are also involved in various defence projects in India."
Quantech will start their sales operations for Asia Pacific from India and is looking at how their services can optimise manufacturing processes of Indian car companies "for example how they can improve their exports from the current 50,000 cars to 100,000 in the same period of time," Gandhi said.
These companies are taking on not only bits and pieces of works in the development of a new model, but also critical work right from concept to pre-production.
"At the concept stage, we advice clients on innovative designs utilising materials and processes such as advanced high strength steels, hydro-forming and compression moulding, besides process-driven strategies in minimisation of part count, weight and cost," Gandhi said.
These firms work on mission-critical domains on how a life can be saved when a person is on the move - be it either in a car or an aircraft. "Our clients rely on us for developing cost-effective products," Melligeri said.
Using various tools such as CATIA, Unigraphics, I-Deas, Pro Engineer, Solid Works and Solid Edge, these companies are leveraging the best of the talent India can offer and are working with clients such as GM, Ford, Nissan, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.