Detroit to launch design products

Michigan-based Detroit Engineered Products (DEP) and Pune-based Autoline Industries Ltd (AII), will tieup to launch three new faster throughput-enabling mechanical and engineering design products in global markets by the end of the year.

DEP was recently acquired by Autoline and the acquisition has meant that research and development for the upcoming products would be conducted at both R&D centres of DEP in Michigan as well as Autoline's centres at their base in Pune and Chennai.

The new products are designed to enable manufacturers to bring their products into the markets faster. The products include RapidMesh which the company claims will enable manufacturers to create new designs out of a blank sheet at double the speed of conventional design tools.

For an automobile manufacturer, where designing a four-wheeler engine could take close to eight weeks, the product's beta version claims to be able to do the same in a flat four days.

Other products include CAD Morpher which is specifically targeted at the growing CAD market in India and engineering wizard which seeks to enable manufacturers to upgrade to automated production processes.

The products could be used in designing cars, cell phones, heavy machinery, aerospace products, construction equipment, toys, surgical equipment and consumer goods among others. DEP earmarks up to 40 per cent of its revenues for product R&D while Autoline does the same with 2-5 per cent of its revenues for R&D on manufacturing.

Autoline is planning more R&D centres in the vicinity of Pune or South Maharashtra and possibly one in Europe. In the coming months, it will develop services around DEP's upcoming product offerings to cater to national and international clients.

Having bagged its first major export order from a US-based manufacturer of power generation products for Genset Canopies and to a manufacturer in Korea for exhaust equipment, Autoline is now looking at exports to Dubai and Europe.

In Dubai, the company is looking at staring its own operations by the end of the year to enable it to establish a stronger international base. Products to be exported include exhaust systems, car doors, genset canopies and other highly-specialised equipment for original equipment manufacturers.

The DEP-Autoline combine recently launched a product Meshworks Morpher 4.0 which enables the customer to rapidly generate a newer design by being able to morph the existing model.

K Radha Krishnan, president, DEP, USA. and Gopal Patwardhan Chairman, AIL revealed that with advanced morphing features and capacity to handle large 'computational fluid dynamics' models of over 50 million nodes, the product has received a good interest from Indian major automobile manufacturers.