Engineering Design - An Exercise in Humility

It was early 2018. The basic design of the Train 18 (later rechristened the Vande Bharat Express) was complete, and the manufacture of prototypes had started. I was visited by the International Business Head of SolidWorks from France. SolidWorks is a 3-D engineering design software from Dassault Systems, the same people who make Rafale fighter planes. It is not as vast and complex as the Unigraphics (Now NX) but was good enough for design of a train system. After all the Dassault Systems designed aircraft on it. 

Over a dinner the man asked me candidly, “Why don’t you design the Main Battle Tank for the Avadi people? They have been doing it for so long.” Avadi, about ten kilometers from the ICF, was the Heavy Vehicle Factory (HVF) of the Ordinance Factory Board. The visitor from Dassault, during his visits to Chennai, would visit both the units, the ICF and the HVF. He told me that the Avadi people had been designing the MBT for over thirty years and there was the ICF that had designed a full train in six months. ICF was his prized customer that he would showcase all over the world.

That got me thinking. This was the remark of a neutral observer. Why was it that the HVF Avadi was still struggling with finalising the design what with MTechs and PhDs as their designers? At the same time how was it that the ICF had done it in six months and was going ahead with production? It must be mentioned here that the design of the Train 18, as finalised in the year 2018, continues to be the production model for over six years and after sixty trains now. The Titagarh-BHEL JV, M/S KINET (TMH-RVNL JV) and the BEML, for their Sleeper versions, have finally adopted the same ICF design after a lot of look around.

I decided to spend some time in the ICF Design Department to understand what made it tick. There are about a hundred designers some of whom were working on Train 18. There were Mechanical and Electrical designers and then there were final integrators. All of them were Group C staff, a far cry from the accomplished designers of a Defence Unit. Yet they had achieved something that Dassault Systems considered a feather in the cap of SolidWorks.

Some of the factors, in my opinion, that made the design department of ICF a superlative achiever were as follows:

1. Design is an iterative process. This, in itself, necessitates that the designer should keep his ego aside and be ready to revise his designs repeatedly, and as many times as required, to find a workable model.

2. There must be a seamless flow of information between the shopfloor and the design office. This includes transmission of data on incompatibility, manufacturability, and misfits from production to design and the humility of the latter to listen carefully and make necessary changes and improvements. 

3.  Don’t wait for perfection. That day never comes. The Train 18 team had begun the production as soon as the basic design was ready and kept improving and improvising on the go.

4. There must be a design freeze at some point in time. Someone in the management should have the authority, courage, and maturity to order a stop to endless tinkering. Freeze the design and push ahead. 

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