Crossthoughts

 Why Core Engineering matters? Today we are known best in international fora as people who are good at IT and ITES jobs. India gets most of its foreign earnings through workforce employed in such jobs abroad. It started in 1995s and though many would not have given a prediction that this would be by far the wealth creator for India, it has belied all and has been our primary source of wealth generation, especially foreign exchange. I would put all the investment from foreign firms in India into such related services. Will it last for more years? – YES definitely so. Will it give our nation a great voice in the international arena? – Question remains., Let’s stop a while and go to look towards China , which focused on building products, at the same time we were focused in IT and ITES. The Chinese were not a great IT services nation, and their products in 1990s hardly gained international reputation. They were prone to failures and as a brand they had very low value. Look whe...

  Will we get to see another TOYOTA? The TPS or the TOYOTA PRODUCTION SYSTEM as we know is the key to Toyota’s success. Fully gaining the benefits of the Toyota Production System requires a full transfer of Toyota’s practices and methods, including several factors unique to Toyota which are often forgotten. While many companies attempt to implement the Toyota Production System (TPS), they often fail because they do not realize that you need to put the entire system in place, and not just bits and pieces of it, to gain the same type of culture and process improvement that Toyota can boast of. One of the greatest strengths of TPS is the use of the bottoms-up approach, where employees are free to identify and implement processes to improve processes , resulting in more streamlined steps and greater quality. Where there is plenty of literature on how other companies often struggle to put this into practice, due to a lack of trust and true two-way communication , two often ignore...

Who is the winner? Is he the person who comes first in a competition? Yes, that’s how we define a winner and it’s that type of a winner whom I don’t want to celebrate. But why? Are we not according praises to the person who comes first in 100m race? Don’t we adore the person who scores the maximum marks? Is the world not found wanting to make a hero of a person who wins the arts, science, sports or any competition? Don’t we grade people in a company on the basis of performance and reward them and make one as the winner? In fact we are all taught that the whole world is a massive race and we need to win.  Just to celebrate the winner we find many ways to define competitions and grade the winners as gold silver and bronze medal winners. Giving them prizes, boosts the ego especially those of the winners. Where are we running? Don’t we realize that of umpteen participants, one or two or may be three are accorded rewards and the others, who are very many, are left so d...

Here comes the part two of the post on Reverse Engineering. Will companies that offer reverse engineering solutions stand by their clients in an all-weather relationship when a lawsuit is framed for illegal – copying? What then is the merit of reverse engineering? Drug companies make generic versions of internationally patented drugs by alternate process. This has become an issue in international forums and the image of Indian research has definitely taken a beating. Cheap Chinese copies of famous brands in the realm of mobile phones, cars etc., have definitely damaged the reputation of the Chinese. Well in the days of yore in engineering for automobiles, one used to say that when GM makes a new car the next day Ford or Chevrolet would come up with a similar one. Well is this Reverse Engineering? Why have their names suffered? Are they practicing safe reverse engineering which others don’t? Drugs Automobiles, machinery, electronic goods, - name it they all fall under Engine...

Can Apple, Samsung, Sony reverse engineer each other’s products and give them a slight shape difference and enter the market? Is it ethical? The easy availability of computer-aided design packages, reverse engineering methodology has become an easy tool to create a 3D model of an existing part. This is helped by CAD, 3 axes CMM with cloud point data and formation of 3D models automatically. Scanners and 3D printers give you the illusion that reverse engineering is easy as a fairy tale. The hard work done by the original inventor tends to get belittled and it seems that reverse engineering is Unethical.   In order to reproduce a part in the entirety one often needs to go deep and get to the bottom of the issue – be it ethical, or functional. Well both have answers and seldom do we find an article that elucidates on both these issues comprehensively. Technical: in order to make a part or specify a part in mechanical Engineering we need to specify the following: Here I h...

Here is a new Video that spells more on the chaithanya logic that I had written earlier.