In India's modern industrial economy, the automotive industry has emerged as a significant contributor to the country's GDP and as the largest employer in the manufacturing sector. In addition, India has signaled its arrival on the global automotive scenario by developing world-class automobiles and earning itself a chance to compete with global majors. This has opened up tremendous market opportunities outside India for their products.

The automotive industry is poised to get increasingly competitive as global automakers are looking to India for marketing their products, to setup manufacturing bases and also to source an array of automotive products and related services. In this scenario, India has not only emerged as a key market, but also a strategic base to source quality products and services.

Critical element of PLM
In this emerging global scenario, Indian service providers need a greater and a deeper insight into the manufacturing processes. This can be achieved by adopting a new and fast growing process centric approach within PLM, which is Digital Manufacturing, a strategic approach for Planning, Detailing and deploying optimal manufacturing processes. Digital Manufacturing is a critical element of a PLM strategy that ensures product designs can be turned into profitable products.

Some of the key drivers for Digital Manufacturing are:

• Increase in demands on quality & price pressures
•  Shortened time to market cycles
•  Need to adopt global best practices & processes in design and manufacturing
•  Increasing need to improve efficiency, cut costs and increase throughput of manufacturing facilities
•  Changes in design without affecting production schedules
•  Growth of the automotive component supply chain
•  Increasingly competitive scenario
•  A growing and a vibrant economy
•  Drive to achieve corporate objectives such as profitability, etc.

Now, let's take a look into why Digital Manufacturing processes could be important for manufacturers. Ideally, we could all visualize a product in our minds and conceptualize the manufacturing processes to each other. This would probably hold good for small but simple products. But today's products are far too complex to conceptualize within your mind. As hard as it is to verbally describe a complex product in detail, imagine trying to describe a production line, equipment, material flow, tooling processes and work flow instructions to manufacture a product. To add to this, for many product development & manufacturing companies, the digital communication & visualization environment stops with the product design. When it comes to developing plant layouts, work cells, material flow paths and other manufacturing process designs; engineers have been forced to rely on traditional and manual techniques. Now with Digital Manufacturing, such manufacturing processes for complex products with thousands of parts can be digitally detailed, planned, simulated and communicated seamlessly among engineers, manufacturing personnel, suppliers and managements.

Some leading manufacturers have adopted Digital Manufacturing tools to perfect manufacturing processes before making any physical investments. Manufacturers are combining the digital processes & resources to simulate a digital factory to evaluate multiple plant & process designs before investing in a prototype. This leads to the development of production facilities and processes in a faster, efficient, cost effective and error free way.

Lean Manufacturing
Manufacturing companies have evolved a new strategy through 'lean manufacturing', a manufacturing approach that involves systematic elimination of non-value added processes. Digital Manufacturing has provided the right platform and information to institutionalize such lean manufacturing programs consistently.

Benefits of making as many decisions possible in the Digital environment is allowing manufacturers to evaluate multiple, radically different manufacturing scenarios without committing to physical investments. Digital Manufacturing provides a robust platform for simulating the results of such decision-making without any penalty for making mistakes.

Digital Manufacturing encompasses a wide range of solutions for manufacturing companies. Some of them solutions are aimed at addressing:

• Process planning for methodical & structured process planning, early recognition of process risks, re-use of proven processes, traceable changes and decisions, and access to scattered process knowledge
•  Design for Assembly solutions is available to develop assembly & maintenance procedures
•  Robotics, tooling definition, workcell layout, Robot programming and Workcell Simulation
•  Factory Floor simulation for validation of process flow and to study the behavior of a digital factory over time. Analyze performance of existing or proposed facilities

Digital manufacturing has propelled faster time to market, reduced product cost, reduced manufacturing costs, improved product quality and better Return-on-investment (ROI) for manufacturers. Outsourcing the entire process adds another added advantage to the manufacturer.