On October 29, 2020, CIMdata attended the HCL Analyst event entitled “Digital Engineering for the next decade, today.” Mr. C. Vijayakumar, President and CEO of HCL Technologies, opened the event with a review of HCL’s strategies and performance. He talked about HCL’s successes in both growth and customer satisfaction. The transformation of HCL overseen by Mr. Vijayakumar is very impressive. Five years ago, HCL received 90% of its revenue in existing core services. Today, HCL has transitioned to receive over 20% from new services such as digital engineering, IoT, and cloud, and over 16% from helping customers reimagine mature products and platforms. The growth is supported by the claim that they are working with 65 of the top 100 R&D spenders. CIMdata was also intrigued as Mr. C Vijayakumar noted that many of the contracts were based on risk/reward assessments, providing HCL ever more significant incentives to perform.1
After Mr. C Vijayakumar’s presentation, several HCL executives and customers presented on Digital Engineering, Cloudification, The Future of Mobility, 5G, and Accelerated Smart Transformation. All the areas discussed are critical elements of digital transformation and can be leveraged by all manufacturing companies. Presenting customers represented healthcare, telecommunications, high tech electronics, and automotive industries. They all reviewed how HCL helps them leverage these different technologies to compete over the next decade.
Mr. GH Rao, President, Engineering, and R&D Services, delivered an overview of his group’s services and the wide range of industries supported. His teams provides Product engineering, Platform engineering, and Operational Technologies Services. They focus on satisfying their customers’ business needs, not just providing technology. A key driver is the “time to monetize” which drives many other aspects of digital engineering, including shrinking the product lifecycle and time to service and continuously improving efficiency. CIMdata sees HCL’s approach of combining people, process, and technology into offerings focused on addressing the business drivers affecting their clients as a strong strategy, one consistent with CIMdata’s approach for much of its nearly 40-year history. The client speaker, from a manufacturer of health diagnostic equipment reviewed some of the aspects of digitalization HCL helped his company achieve, including design and supply chain and remote and proactive support. A holistic PLM approach to PLM was critical to the results, and CIMdata was especially impressed by the reduction in time to market from 26 months to 18 weeks, along with a corresponding decrease in part cost by over 80%, and over 90% reduction in engineering efforts.
Executives from an automotive supplier and an OEM explained their successful partnerships with HCL and the need for new ways of working to bring autonomous vehicles and their technologies safely to the mass market. The presentations were pragmatic and balanced as the automotive industry faces mounting product complexities. HCL’s varied roles with both companies help the industry make autonomous vehicles possible in the years to come.
CIMdata was pleased to see the broad success stories presented by HCL and its customers. The customers’ willingness to present at this forum and give their partners and suppliers credit is a great service. It helps companies understand what can be accomplished and who can help them achieve their goals. Within this event, HCL showed how they helped clients in a variety of industries achieve notable improvements. Companies looking to accelerate their digital transformation journey should review HCL’s capabilities, and successes as CIMdata believes HCL can help companies on various aspects of digital engineering, making business impact.
1 Research for this highlight was partially supported by HCL.