Ashwin Venkatesan — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:21]
Hi, everyone. We are back with HFS Unfiltered. I’m Ashwin. I’m an executive research leader. We recently launched a Horizon report on the best of ER&D services providers, so we evaluated 29 providers on their capabilities across the HFS ER&D value chain. And Bosch was recognized as a Horizon 2 innovator. So, to talk about this a bit more, I have with me Digant Shah, who’s the Chief Revenue Officer for Bosch Software and Digital Solutions. Digant, congratulations and thank you so much for taking your time. So, ER&D services, right? It’s an exciting space, a lot of talk on AI infusion, software-based models, outcome-based delivery. So, Digant, what are you seeing from your customers and what are you hearing from them as expectations?
Digant Shah — Chief Revenue Officer, Bosch Software and Digital Solutions[01:13]
Yeah, Ashwin, firstly, thank you to you and HFS for having me on the show today and for hosting me and recognizing Bosch. To answer your question, I’m seeing a few things from the customers from an expectation perspective. I’m seeing the customers looking to adopt AI and software for strategy while designing and developing the products, especially to drive product innovation and differentiation vis-à-vis their competitors. I’m also seeing a perceptible shift towards an outcome-based model, with increased expectations from service providers to invest in co-innovation, improved life cycle collaboration, and create a skin in the game with risk-reward oriented engagement models. Further, customers are looking to embrace sustainability and circular economy principles. This is due to a combination of either regulatory requirements or organizational mandates and targets on carbon neutrality goals. And lastly, lots and lots of focus on security, cybersecurity, securing data, protecting IP due to convergence of the physical and digital world and blurring of the boundaries between IT, OT, and ET layers. So these are four main things that I’m seeing from the customer and their expectations as they’re evolving.
Ashwin Venkatesan — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[02:18]
Yeah, they’re very consistent with what we observe as well. So how’s Bosch investing and evolving its capabilities to meet some of these expectations?
Digant Shah — Chief Revenue Officer, Bosch Software and Digital Solutions[02:18]
Yeah, so Ashwin, as you know, right, as Bosch, we have a very strong reputation of engineering excellence, driving co-innovation, and unlocking value for our customers through our next-gen technology. So we’ll continue to invest. We have been investing and we’ll continue to invest in three main areas. One is to create flagship platforms, solutions, and IPs at the intersection of domain and next-gen technology. The domains of interest for us are, of course, manufacturing, auto, high tech, healthcare, med tech, and energy, and the next-gen technology of interest for us is Gen AI, cybersecurity, sustainability, digital twin, and IT/OT connectivity. The second area that we are investing and will continue to invest is on technology and industry partnerships, innovation hubs, R&D labs, and lighthouse projects with some of our strategic customers. And the third area — you know, Bosch is present in 150 countries, so we want to leverage Bosch’s global presence. This is to build localized capabilities to support our customers who are looking to reshore amidst the tariff pressure and geopolitical uncertainty, as well as for those mid-size customers who have missed out on the offshore skills and GCC wave. We are looking to help them in the GCC incubation and GCC journey, so they can capitalize on skilled offshore talent and create economies of scale.
Ashwin Venkatesan — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[03:41]
Yeah, clearly lots happening, Digant. So, would you want to bring this to life by sharing a recent case study, quickly, and then what outcomes Bosch had delivered?
Digant Shah — Chief Revenue Officer, Bosch Software and Digital Solutions[03:41]
So, there’s this global consumer-tech company which was grappling with delays in product launch due to the siloed nature of product development and the manual nature of product verification and validation, all of which resulted in missed revenue opportunities, dilution of market share, low profitability, and a struggle to keep pace with the other competitor brands in this space. Now, as Bosch STS, we helped them to transform the product engineering life cycle by bringing technology, data, process, and people together to create this digital thread which linked their engineering data and the shop floor data to unlock efficiency along the entire value stream. We also helped in integrating technologies such as AI, cloud, IoT, and software design engineering to modernize their enterprise architecture, modernize the infrastructure, legacy systems, R&D, and V&V processes. We created an HMI innovation lab with robotics technology to help gather insights into user behavior and to help them improve the quality and the experience of the product. The results showed 30% improved time to market, 40% faster lead time across the NVT projects, and 20% elevated R&D efficiency. The team was very proud. It’s been a multi-year journey, more than five-plus years, but the team’s been very proud of the transformation. Even the customer is very happy with the transformation that we have brought about in five years for the entire product development life cycle.
Ashwin Venkatesan — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[05:15]
Excellent, exciting stuff. So, cross-functional orchestration to drive outcomes. Digant, thank you so much for sharing these insights, and congrats once again and all the best.
Digant Shah — Chief Revenue Officer, Bosch Software and Digital Solutions[05:15]
Thank you, Ashwin, and thank you to HFS.
