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1 - 15 November 2010
Frugal Engineering has deep roots in Indian mindset
Pankaj Tewari
‘F
rugal Engineering’, now famously associated to Indian engineering capability, thanks to the Tata Nano and Carlos Ghosn’s vocal admiration of the approach, has its deep roots in the unique ‘frugal’ mind-
working as ‘super designers’, and frugal mindset. It forces unconset of Indians. many still do. ventional thinking – because It comes to Indians easily As a super designer – a designmost conventional product develon account of being habitual er who is also expected to do opment leads to ‘doing less with to a perpetual lack of adequate analysis, proto developresources with respect to ment, testing and ensure the population. In addition successful introduction to being an Indian engineer, The use of approaches of the part/product – one I had the good fortune of like Ethnography, Quality has the advantage of lookstarting my career in a wellFunction Deployment, and ing at the big picture all the equipped design centre of a very progressive Indian comKano Analysis are of the tools time and allows for making adjustments on the prodpany. It was years later, while to analyse customer needs. uct as a whole rather than discussing product developin parts. ment programs with global It is this ‘frugal mindset’ customers that I realised the that enables effective ‘frugal engimore’ (no risk approach). It also enormous value and uniqueness neering’. There are three main compels questioning all existing of the experience we had gained features of frugal engineering: practices, products and systems. in our early years. A complete generation of The grooming of an engineer young Indian design engineers, to be ‘able to do more with less’ A) Products tailored to including myself, were used to builds a strong foundation of a customer needs:
Clean sheet development of products that are very closely configured to meet the needs of the customer – and very little else. The emphasis here is on NOT having features that do not address the stated or unstated needs of the customer. Hence, a sound understanding of the customer’s stated and unstated needs is primary for frugal engineering. The use of approaches like Ethnography, Quality Function Deployment, and Kano Analysis are some of the tools that aid in understanding customer needs.
B) Developing products cheaper: This is the most popularly known aspect of frugal engineering. Frugal engineering is defi ned as the science of breaking-up complex engineering processes into its basic components and then re-building each component in the most economical manner – it extends to use of most economical resources for product development. Off-shore product development in India and China attempts to leverage this aspect with partial success. The key here is appropriate splitting of work. In our experience of off-shoring and multi-shoring between the US, India and China, we found that success of the model depends entirely on two things – communication (the more the better) and work breakdown (effective line-ups). There are methods of effective work breakdown that do not compromise on efficiency and provide far higher benefits than originally envisaged. A 30 percent savings in product development costs and faster product development has been experienced by us.
C) Value Engineering: Value engineering is at the heart of frugal engineering – a frugal product is one that is able to achieve the same function with bare minimum. We have experienced the value of using an evolved Value Engineering process (VEP). It is based on looking at a part/product from nine different aspects and generating high impact ideas for quick implementation. Cost cutting to the extent of 20 percent, without compromising the value of the product has been achieved. For some clients this has resulted in multi-million-dollar savings due to the large annual volumes the product. This also involves a redesign-to-build approach, which also leverages low cost country manufacturing into the design. Given the mindset and grooming of a section of Indian engineers, frugal engineering is a very high value and unique offering that India has to offer to the global manufacturing companies of the world. [The author is Head, Eicher Engineering Solutions, Gurgaon. He heads the Indian Operations of the company and can be reached at ptewari@eicher.in. EES is the engineering services business unit of VE Commercial Vehicles (A Volvo Group and Eicher Motors Joint Venture). Frugal engineering is one of the offerings of EES]