PENTAIR: Dr Neeraj Gupta (third from right) and his team with pool products Pentair's Okhla centre designs pool products for its parent

In May 2001, Neeraj Gupta, 31 (he prefixes dr to the name), Manu Verma, 29, and Rahul Kamble, 28, all employees of $3.5 billion (Rs 16,800 crore) American multinational Pentair's Center for Design and Research in Delhi's sweating industrial hub Okhla were flown down by their company to Los Angeles on the kind of hush-hush mission popularised by cold-war era motion pics. Their task was to redesign the entire portfolio of products of Rainbow Life Guard, a Pentair subsidiary that makes fluidisers, filters and other similar products that go into swimming pools and aquariums. The job should have taken six months, but the trio managed it in four. Their secret? Every evening, when they were done for the day, they would "hand over" their work to 14 colleagues back in Okhla. "The 12-hour time difference ensured a 24-hour workday," grins Gupta. "And the steady workflow ensured a reduced product development cycle."

It isn't just Pentair that has discovered the designed-in-India benefit. GE has: the Bangalore-based GE Transportation Systems Engineering Design and Development Centre-it occupies part of a floor on a building aptly named Innovator in a technology park in the city-is engaged in the design of components that will go into GE's next-gen locomotives. Consumer goods major Whirlpool's R&D centre in Ranjangaon, Pune, provides design inputs to its parent. Boeing, Caterpillar, and Airbus routinely outsource part of their design requirements to Indian companies-Delhi-based 3d Solutions, Gurgaon-based Axis India, and Infosys respectively. "Multinational companies realise India's strengths and are outsourcing design-work to reduce costs," says U.A. Athavankar the head of iit-Mumbai's Industrial Design Centre.

Athavankar is right, but not completely; it isn't just the cost. It is time, rather time-difference, something that helps companies get the most out of a global 24X7 workforce and cut (product) development cycles. It is expertise; the Indian middle class' emphasis on science and engineering makes the country a hothouse of CAD-CAM talent. What software was to India in the booming 1990s, design promises to be in the hope-filled zeroes.

There's Money In Design

They aren't yet Infosys or Wipro, but a clutch of Indian companies could well be the industrial design-domain's equivalent of tech's glimmer twins. Among them is Tata Elxsi. The company boasts one of India Inc's largest design teams-11 product designers and a team of 48-and a client-roster of 18 multinational companies including Unilever, which has named Tata Elxsi a design supplier for all types of packages. Last year, the division accounted for 22 per cent of the company's Rs 128.9-crore turnover. "With 60 per cent of our business coming from overseas clients we have established ourself as a global (industrial) design company," says Rajiv Desh Prabhu, Director (Business Development), Tata Elxsi.

Manufacturing majors with significant in-house design skills have been quick to latch on to the opportunity. The Hero Group spun off its design division into Hero Global Design. Today, HGD's 60-strong workforce works with five multinational companies. Much of the work is routine stuff-such as converting 2-d engineering drawings into 3-D, or programming the numerical control path, the complex code that gets a machine to do exactly what the design requires it to-but that doesn't bother HGD's Senior General Manager N.K. Vashisht. "We can't be Italians in design, but we do have a competitive edge in engineering." Sona Steering, with 3-S Solutions, LML with n-Ablers Infotech (India), and Hi-Tech Gears with Hi-Tech e-soft are other old economy auto (or auto-part) companies that have realised the potential of their design divisions to become revenue-centres. "It's a natural extension as they already have the domain expertise," says Bhupesh Lall, Director (Marketing), PTC, a company that vends computer aided design (CAD) software.

Scratch an opportunity and you'll find a host of small wannabes; industrial design is no exception. Pune-based Onio Design, founded by two National Institute of Design alumni, Manoj Kothari and Prakash Khangode is one such. The only marquee name on Onio's client list is Walmart, for which it designs gift articles like candle stands, flower vases, key rings, watches, and tabletop cutleries. "We are still not targeting the cream," admits Kothari. Another such, Delhi-based Fifth Quadrant designed a refrigerator for Hitachi. And still another, Incubis, did a wallpaper stripper for a Dutch firm. It isn't the i-Mac, but it'll have to do for now.

ONIO DESIGN: Manoj Kothari (standing, left) and Prakash Khagode Onio Designs gift articles like candle stands and key rings for walmart

Design Is In The Details

The very nature of industrial design makes this feat of distributed work possible. ID encompasses modules of software, mechanical drawing engineering, materials science, and electronics. Not too many companies have the requisite expertise in every module; that makes outsourcing a practical way to cut cost, and tap the best skills in the trade. "Our clients are excellent in conceptualising a design but look to companies like us to take the initial ideas and put them through the entire process," explains Nitin Pai, Head (Industrial Design), Tata Elxsi.

Vashisht got it right, we aren't Italians, and id companies won't land large contracts from multinational customers in a hurry. That doesn't faze them: much like Indian software companies started with maintenance work and moved into high-end business transformation or technology services, they see themselves gradually moving up the value chain. In the meantime, they'll make money-not an inconsiderable amount of it. In the first nine months of its existence Hero Global Design ratcheted up its turnover to Rs 13 crore; 3s' revenues in its first year of operations was Rs 6.75 crore. And while average profit margins in industrial design are in the region of 70 per cent, 3s' Sunjay Kapur-he counts the likes of DaimlerChrysler, Krupp Presta, and Valeo among his customers-claims they could range from a low of 30 per cent to a high of 300 per cent. And the size of the export-focussed Indian industrial design industry is expected to go from Rs 400 crore today to Rs 700 crore in 2004, according to industry estimates. It isn't software, but it's getting there.

TATA ELXSI: Dr Nitin P. Pai (second from right) with his team The company boasts a client roster of 18 MNCs and is a design-supplier for packaging to Unilever

The Anatomy Of An Advantage

It'll be hard for id companies in other parts of the world to under-price their Indian competitors. "A design project executed in India will cost at least 40 per cent lower than one executed in the US," says Tata Elxsi's Pai. Even simple CAD work of the kind Hero Global Design does costs $50 a hour in the US; Hero bills its clients $30. And that includes its own margin; multinationals that have their own design centres in the country save even more. The work that Pentair's India centre does for the parent could cost a sixth of what it would have in the US. "Technicians don't charge by time in India," explains Gupta of Pentair. "They give you a time-independent estimate."

Indian academia, too, holds the promise of rich, albeit chancy pickings for multinationals. Enough are willing to take that chance: Apple has approached National Institute of Design (NID) for a design for a hand-held computing device targeted at the old. And Japan's Tokai Rika wants NID to design the media-interface for its car-safety devices. "Foreign companies are increasingly tapping our students and faculty for design inputs," says Pradyumna Vyas, Head (Industry Projects), NID. "The projects just keep coming." That they do; and a few multinationals have also realised that Indian design pros are capable of high-end work. Taiwan-based V&V Design-it designs DVD players and mobile PCs-hopes to leverage India's design expertise and Taiwan's manufacturing prowess to its benefit. "We'll gain from the synergy of operating both in India and Taiwan," says Manoj Karam, the Head of the company's Indian operations.

The near-lack of a domestic market for industrial design services, argue the Cassandras, could deter the growth of the industry. "Product innovation is almost non-existent in India," rues George Mathews, the founder of Icarus, a Bangalore-based design hothouse. Still, that may not be that big a hurdle. It hasn't in software and design is clearly headed the code-way.