Making Ideas Come Alive on Paper and in Real Life

As a leading manufacturer of automotive and non-automotive braking systems and ferrous castings in India, Brakes India Limited (Brakes India) has a blue chip clientele of major automobile companies like Ford, Honda and General Motors.

A strong believer in the power of innovation, as seen in its capabilities to introduce new products and customise them to meet customers’ requirements, AutoCAD has been Brakes India’s software of choice for product and tool design for the past 20 years. One of India’s earliest users of AutoCAD? with its adoption of AutoCAD Release 9 in 1987, Brakes India now uses both AutoCAD and Autodesk® Inventor™ Series extensively in its Tool Design Department.

Why go back to the drawing board?

Drafting used to be a tedious affair for Brakes India. In the past, when designing brake geometries on the drafting board, plans had to be redrawn with every design change, especially when a brake was designed from scratch. In 1990, the design team experienced a breakthrough with AutoCAD Release 10, as these changes and design processes could be automated by writing an AutoLISP programme.

Then a member of the project design team, Mr. S Ravishankar, General Manager, New Products, Brakes India Ltd, said, ”With AutoLISP, we could easily execute the instructions within AutoCAD to automate our routine processes. Operational efficiency was vastly improved. What used to take five hours only took three to four minutes with AutoCAD.”

Calling it a major breakthrough and a great experience, Ravishankar strongly recommends AutoCAD as “one of the best drafting packages one can have”. Highlighting all the releases since AutoCAD 2000 as “great packages with many productivity tools”, Ravishankar brings a unique user perspective with his experience with AutoCAD since 1991.

Productivity Enhancements Entice Mindset Changes He revealed that Brakes India started using AutoCAD Release 9 in 1987 for product design and later as a drafting tool for Tool Design in 1990. The DOS release then was not as advanced as the current Windows-based releases in terms of dimensioning, hatching, block editing, user-friendliness and ease of customisation. Despite that, the designers on the team then that were still using manual drafting, being hesitant to move onto computerised drafting, were fascinated by the productivity gains the younger, more IT-savvy team members were enjoying with AutoCAD.

“AutoCAD commands such as ‘ARRAY’ allowed us to quickly create large, repetitive patterns. In contrast, everything had to be done manually on the drafting board. Despite the generation gap, the older designers that were hesitant about computerised drawing were beginning to see the benefits of using AutoCAD,” said Ravishankar.

For these designers, the transition from manual drafting to AutoCAD required a major paradigm shift and extensive training. For example, many were not used to the idea of “not seeing the full drawing” in AutoCAD, as this is only possible when one pans or zooms into the various views. Though it involved a lot of “consistent internal selling”, Ravishankar shared that eventually, everyone moved successfully onto AutoCAD. In fact, his designers are now no longer willing to do any manual drawings on the drafting board. They have even given away their pencils and erasers to their children!

At Brakes India Ltd, there are currently about 20 designers using AutoCAD Inventor series and AutoCAD 2004 in the Tool Design department. By shifting to computerised drafting, they have gained a massive reduction in lead time for design automation of fixtures and gauges, dimensional analysis, stretching and scaling.

Bridging the Gap Between 2D and 3D

For 3D modelling, the Brakes India team automates its drafting process and completes its drawings just by filling in or changing the parameters, thanks to the Microsoft Visual Basic interface for 3D modelling in Autodesk Inventor. By embracing Autodesk Inventor for its 3D designs, the design team now enjoys the freedom of integrating existing 2D designs and 3D design data in one package. Complete product lines can be designed with fewer revisions while production-ready drawings are delivered more quickly.

According to Ravishankar, the ability to bridge the 2D and 3D gap is critical, as many manufacturing companies only have the capabilities to read 2D files. Autodesk Inventor helps manufacturing companies move to 3D through an integrated set of design applications and 2D transition tools.

Looking Ahead

A keen fan of AutoCAD for the past 20 years, Ravishankar envisions that industry forces will push for greater interoperability among the various platforms available in the market today to enable greater communication between designers and manufacturers. An even tighter integration between 2D and 3D design will also be critical in the next 10 to 15 years.

Looking back at Brakes India’s AutoCAD journey over the past 20 years, Ravishankar recognises how the company has scaled new heights in its design innovation with the choice of state-of-the-art world class technology from strategic technology partners such as Autodesk. Choosing to equip its people with the right tools has enabled Brakes India to continuously enlarge its market presence and become a leading brake systems supplier exporting to over 35 countries around the world today.