Newly appointed Managing Director of ITandFactory GmbH1, Mr.Ajit Joshi, answers to the questions of the editorial board.
August 22, 2011
Mr. Joshi, congratulations on the new position! What are your ideas to approach the new business?
What attracted me to Neilsoft and ITandFactory was the product suite of CADISON and its potential to enhance customer’s engineering project efficiency by at least 30 precent. In my former employments, I had designed a plant, had written software for plant design, had automated such planning processes and integrated with PLM. Our vision for CADISON is to create and deliver the best integrated plant engineering solution and services to help our customers to improve their project planning, investment optimization, risk management, project completion speed and energy efficiency of the plants.
Can we take some of the learnings from the PLM vendors serving the discrete manufacturing industry or the ERP solutions providers?
Surely. CADISON combines the engineering workflow into the single system and thus significantly accelerates the planning processes. The common object-oriented data model for the different fields of application
— e.g. tender planning, process engineering, installation planning, pipeline planning, electrical engineering, and instrumentation — makes it possible to integrate all planning phases so that time and costs are saved.
With Cadison’s modularity and reusability, we are able to significantly reduce the cost of plant design, modifications, and maintenance.
Our both shareholders have a very strong engineering legacy and have been providing a tremendous support to grow CADISON into a global solution. Secondly we are fast becoming a complete integrated engineering solution provider while our competition is only pushing boxes.
Where do you see room for improvement of this plant plant design suite?
We have to increase the global impact of this product. Up to now we have established a strong presence in the D.A.CH. region, with more than 300 active customers and 6 500 licenses. Our next goal is to expand into Emerging markets like India as well as other matured markets of US and other European countries. Also keep in mind that most of our customers are also moving globally and with Neilsoft’s international footprint, we are able to help them to make this transformation in a smooth manner.
Since you have very ambitious plans: Can you provide the needed R&D resources?
Absolutely and in fact we have already worked out an accelerated product development plan with 6-monthly major releases for next three cycles! To further improve efficiency for our customers, we are now also providing segment specific customized solutions to meet our customer’s standardization and design automation goals.
Good luck! Let us switch to a more technical issue: Since CADISON is running on to top of AutoCAD, ITand- Factory doesn’t deliver an own geometry engine. You can regard to some extend that this is a lack in the portfolio. Do you agree?
We don’t want to invest in building our own 3D kernel because that’s not our business! Our strategy is very clear: we are an innovative engineering oriented solution and not CAD driven. Having said that, even today CADISON is the best plant design solution on the AutoCAD platform and we want to integrate even more tightly into the Autodesk ecosystem. For example, CADISON is very tightly connected to Inventor, Autodesk’s other 3D CAD product. And we have started to integrate Revit which is addressing the AEC and BIM market. And again the question remains: Why should we push our customers to go away from AutoCAD when they have already invested in it? It is the most widely used CAD platform and in fact our customers appreciate the fact that is much easier for their existing AutoCAD users to learn CADISON.
Okay, that sounds convincing. What is your recommendation for document handling? E.g. in the case of a multi-site infrastructure?
I would like to answer this question in two parts: CADISON provides an excellent document, revision, workflow and change management capability. We also provide integrations to other document management systems (DMS). Our many large customers have already deployed DMS and we optimize their resources by delivering a tight integration. The second part of the answer: We want to make sure to build a solid project engineering and project management layer which contains comprehensive project communication, tracking and productivity measurement capabilities.
As regards to multi-site, CADISON Engineer2web solution provides direct
web access to our object data and structures, which can be viewed or edited using a simple web browser. We’re also moving to support CADISON on Citrix platform. Additionally, we have started a couple of pilots to move our solution on the cloud. In short, a lot of progress is happening with respect to concurrent usage of CADISON.
What is your strategy for ERP integration?
CADISON is a comprehensive integrated engineering tool that provides a central database solution to improve inter-disciplinary workflows, produces updated part lists for the company’s ERP system and uses existing AutoCAD investments. We have a lot of customers working with enterprise ERP systems like SAP, Movex, Navision, or Infor. Most of our customers decide to have all the information inside the CADISON Project Engineer database in order to have only one frontend to the project engineers. So, for the project engineering, our product is the leading system exchanging data with the ERP system for the engineers. To learn more about these exciting technologies I would like to invite your readers to the upcoming CADISON International Conference in Darmstadt on October 27 and 28,2011.
The vendor headquartered in Bad Soden near Frankfurt/Main, Germany, is a joint venture of Neilsoft Ltd. (Pune, India) and Triplan AG (Bad Soden). Mr Joshi holds also the position of President IT Division and Head of Operations with Neilsoft.
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Watch us on YouTube
Join us on Linkedin
Follow us on Pinterest