What kind of backing do you have from Kalyani Forge with regards to funds, infrastructure or people?
None. Whilst Kalyani forge is a manufacturing company and a forging company, Kalyani studio is a completely independent entity and is all about high strength engineering and design and high strength is a very large domain that spans many industries and all applications irrespective of manufacturing technology, so you could do you know forging or casting or 3D printing or any new technique that's coming up.
Most industry leaders that I speak to tell me about the importance of integrating ‘Make in India' with ‘Design in India'. You seem to have taken the right step in that direction. How confident are you with regards to India's design and engineering capabilities?
With Kalyani Studio, we want India to manufacture innovative products which are designed by ourselves. I want to change the scepticism around the talent we have in India; we have a billion people and that itself is a huge strength. Our initiative is to start creating those opportunities in alignment with ‘Make in India' which is creating jobs, in the manufacturing industry. The world came to India for forging and we continue to prove them right, the world will soon come to India for high-strength engineering solutions. We cannot be another China, we cannot be the factory of the world - India has to manufacture innovative products and be a part of the global supply chain right from the conceptualisation of the product to the finished product. We want to make India self-reliant in the fields of technology development in high-strength applications.
Technology is changing rapidly. What's relevant today may (will) become obsolete tomorrow. In that context, how do you see design and engineering impacting India's manufacturing progress?
Engineering service providers are numerous, but many follow just routine work like software usage as the primary offering. What people fail to understand is that on giving more importance to effective use of software, they lose out on the thinking required in setting up the right problems to solve. Thus, you see many players don't build a deep expertise in the domain and offer software services in the name of engineering service.
On the customer side, when customers look for solutions around a certain problem, they may find it difficult to identify an Engineering and Design firm that has its core capabilities around that problem domain.
We are solving this gap by creating a new market and a new science of high strength engineering and design. We focus only on products and applications in which high strength performance parameters play a major role in the product success and product profitability. So, we are directly impacting product profitability for our clients by intervening at the very basic design and engineering stage itself.
For example, the pace at which new models are coming out has changed because earlier, it used to take years to come out with new car models, now it's just a matter of few months. But there's lot of work that happens six months in advance, in terms of finalising, conceptualising the look and feel of the car and then the performance of the car. Hence, we operate more on performance side of things. One can't just count the external appearance, even though design tends to be known more for the appearance, but we use design for performance and that's where high strength engineering and design comes in.
What kind of services will Kalyani Studio provide?
Kalyani Studio is a high strength engineering and design company that partners with R&D and innovation teams of OEMs to catalyze their new product ideas with high-strength expertise. The company works from the idea or problem stage to the functional prototype stage and offers end-to-end solutions in this phase of the product life cycle.
We help clients across various Industries to achieve Global Product Category Leadership by increasing the Product Profitability of their Applications.
We offer new-age services for key industrial sectors in the fields of technology development in high-strength applications with four service suites of Product Innovation, Product Optimization, Design for Manufacturing and Testing & Prototyping.
What are the different industry sectors that you will be reaching out to?
We undertake work with various industries specifically with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) those who have their own products and work with their R&D and innovation teams. We will be developing an ecosystem for prototyping and testing activities which will unravel over a longer period into the future. Currently we have tied up with IIT Mumbai, so we have a collaboration on high strength engineering with their Mechanical Engineering Department.
Moreover, high strength products are present everywhere and require high levels of performance. Largely, these are under-the-hood products and applications that withstand tremendously challenging physical conditions like forces, motion, temperature and time. Kalyani Studio is therefore building a new ecosystem and category of high-strength engineering and design to cater to OEMs across all industries like railway, aerospace, automotive, agro-tech, construction equipment. The next wave of growth has to come from design which in my opinion is the next logical progression for the sector.
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