HFS Highlight: HCL’s innovative and business-impact oriented solutions are driving engineering services excellence

We attended October 2020 HCL Technologies’ Analyst and Advisor Day 2020 event on Digital Engineering to understand applications of emerging technologies in digital engineering, key capabilities in this segment, and client success stories among others. Throughout the discussion and interaction, HCL highlighted its engineering expertise, execution scope, and domain capability. Several client success stories also demonstrated HCL’s R&D and engineering capability in different segments of engineering services across industries.

HCL identifies five disruptive trends (Software-defined everything, Connected ecosystem, As-A-Service model, Network economy, and Data-driven engineering) that are enabling key business drivers for digital engineering. HCL is positioning its engineering product and services portfolio around these business drivers (Focus on time to monetize, As A Service monetization model, Shrink time to service, Shortening of the product lifecycle, Demand for hyper-personalization, and Ever-increasing need for efficiencies). Some of the targeted ROIs for HCL are related to customer experience, top-line improvement, operational efficiency, and actionable insights among others. HCL’s engagement with a large healthcare technology company brings out these aspects through a detailed discussion. Over the six years of engagement, HCL worked both on R&D (Related to Laboratory Diagnostics and Point of Care Diagnostics in the areas of platform development, sustenance, software, and reliability support) and manufacturing (Related to Laboratory Diagnostics in the areas of tester design, software development, and validation) initiatives to accelerate digital product journey (less development cost, faster time-to-market, predictive maintenance, etc.)

HCL’s business-case specific emerging technology solutions are driving the client success stories

HCL ERS portfolio broadly covers Product Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Operational Technologies Services that cut across verticals. Its expertise across new-age technologies (Digital Twin/Thread, IoT, 5G, AR/VR, autonomous vehicles, etc.) is embedded into the solutions of these service lines as well as industry-specific solutions. The below client examples highlight some of HCL’s key capabilities across emerging technologies.

• Cloud-native, agnostic solution, with next-generation, AI solutions to predict customer churn for a telecom OEM
• Digital twin for dynamic production environment for a leading aerospace OEM
• AR/VR based solution that helps service technicians with remote access to export information for a leading elevator manufacturer
• Remote adherence monitoring of drug delivery devices
• Packet acceleration solution for 5G networks

The digital engineering theme was around five topics that included HCL’s capability and client success stories: Leveraging Digital Engineering for Business Impact, Cloudification of Products Ecosystem, Next-generation Mobility, World of possibilities with 5G, and IoT led Accelerated Smart Transformation.

• Leveraging Digital Engineering for Business Impact: The session covered various business drivers for digital engineering and the greater need to improve “Time to Monetize” in addition to improving “Time to Market”. The impact of Digital Engineering is across the stakeholders and can be leveraged as a competitive advantage to stay ahead of the competition and create differentiation.
• Cloudification of Products Ecosystem: Explained the transformation from product experiences to ecosystem experiences by connecting the product with the cloud and the whole ecosystem. Provided the client examples that explain the transformation, scale, and industrialization phases of cloud-native products/applications using the different hyperscaler platforms. The outcomes are related to experience management, product modernization, etc.
• Next-generation mobility: Mentioned HCL’s investments, initiatives, solutions, and ecosystem connect in ADAS and autonomous vehicle domain. HCL is in a strategic partnership with a leading automotive technology company for the past 3 years in the areas of vision systems, camera, radar, and ADAS among others. The engagement started with data logging, DMS applications, and then expanded to component engineering and autonomous driving.
• World of possibilities with 5G: Described HCL’s 5G products, solutions, and capability portfolio that can be applied across industries and use-cases (from low to mission-critical applications). HCL is working with a leading technology company across different areas of 5G networks for both consumer and enterprise applications (industrial automation, smart home, etc.).
• IoT led accelerated smart transformation: Explained how HCL is leveraging IoT to enable connected products, connected processes, and connected business to increase resilience across the workforce, operations, and overall business. Leading automotive clients mentioned how HCL is enabling digital innovation through digital product development, digital thread, etc.

The Bottom Line: HCL can become a preferred engineering partner for the enterprises by striking a perfect balance between execution and innovation.

COVID-19 has forced enterprises to shelve many of the R&D and engineering initiatives due to budget constraints. Enterprises are also exploring the option of vendor consolidation as the scope of work decreases and they are forced to reprioritize their outsourcing partner landscape. As HCL ERS already has a long-standing relationship with both core engineering companies and engineering functions of large enterprises, thus it can take these? relationships to the next level by leveraging its strong industry acumen and engineering expertise. The deep client engagements can also result in large engagement and turnkey projects.  HCL needs to industrialize it’s solution deployments for clients besides providing engineering innovation