Why we keep design in-house - CAD, CAM and CAE under one roof
A hardware product is won or lost at the design bench. We keep CAD, CAM, CAE and R&D in-house because the firm that controls the design controls the cost, the finish and the speed of getting it right.
A hardware product is decided long before the first piece is machined. It is decided at the design bench - in the pattern, the tolerances, the way it will be made and finished, the way it will feel in the hand. Get the design right and the manufacturing is a matter of holding a good plan; get it wrong and no amount of machining skill will save the product. That is why we keep design in-house, on CAD, CAM and CAE, with an R&D bench of our own.
Design is where a hardware product is won or lost
Two handles can use the same brass and the same process and feel completely different, because one was designed with care and one was copied. The design decides the proportions a customer reads as quality, the mechanism that makes a lock turn cleanly, the geometry that lets a hinge carry a heavy door without sagging. None of that is added later. It is designed in, or it is missing.
Keeping CAD, CAM and CAE together means the people who imagine the product, the people who plan how it will be machined, and the people who check how it will behave under load are working as one. The design that looks elegant on screen is tested against how it will actually be made and how it will actually be used, before any tooling is cut.
Customised to a brand's specification
Much of our work is making hardware to a brand's own specification - a pattern, a finish, a mechanism that is theirs. That is only possible with design under your own roof. When a brand brings a requirement, in-house design lets us develop it, refine it and move it into production without handing the most sensitive part of the work to an outside party. The brand's design stays the brand's, and we move faster because the loop is short.
Control of cost, quality and speed
Design in-house is not about prestige; it is about control. The firm that owns the design controls the cost, because it decides how the product is made. It controls the quality, because it can design for manufacturability and for the life the product has to live. And it controls the speed, because a change does not wait in a queue at someone else's office. For a maker that has to develop new patterns and finishes continually across a wide catalogue, that control is the difference between leading and following.
This essay is an in-house first draft, prepared for the Piyush Dangariya review. It expresses general operating opinions on themes within his domain, but no specific event, customer, year or biographical claim has been verified. To be edited, signed off, or replaced before publication.
Got a question on what you have just read - or on brass and architectural hardware, manufacturing, exports, or the Jamnagar brass cluster? Write directly to the office.
Partner and marketing head of Madhuram Overseas (established 1995) and the second generation of its founding family - a Jamnagar manufacturer and exporter of modern brass and architectural hardware.