Mr. Sean Yao, Territory Head, ZWSOFT and Mr. Anubhab Hazra, CEO, CADbro, India, in conversation with CNCTimes
Tell us something about CADbro?
Mr. Sean: CADbro is a full-featured, budget-friendly CAD viewer for the designing and manufacturing industry. It’s very easy to use and just like Microsoft office. It can be used by people from different departments such as Sales, Marketing, Project and Purchase department etc. to view the 3D models and to check product manufacturing information.
It supports more than 25 file formats for vivid 3D model viewing and markups. It also includes features ranging from automated animations to mold design assistance. This makes CADbro one of the most powerful solutions in the market today. Since CADbro has its own kernel, unlike other 3D CAD viewers in the market, we can respond quickly to customer needs. Also, we support cloud function and users can upload their files to the cloud easily and quickly, sharing files with their customers or suppliers.
Mr. Anubhab: We now have more than 10 resellers in India and they are all excited by the latest enhancements in version 2019 of CADbro such as auto dimensioning in 2D and that we can extract 2D data from 3D files.
How many versions of CADbro are you offering?
Mr. Anubhab: We have 3 versions which are CADbro lite, CADbro standard, and CADbro full function version. The light version is only a viewer for neutral files, in the standard version, you can open any kind of file, plus it has all the dimensioning and annotation facility. It also has some limited analysis functionality. In the professional version, one can do thickness analysis, undercut analysis, height analysis of the data, draft analysis exploded views, gauging, interference check etc. Our standard version is quite affordable, and we are quite confident that it is going to be our bestselling product for the Indian market. The analysis variant is mainly required by the plastic tool rooms, but for the general engineering company, the standard version is good enough.
Who are your competitors and how is CADbro different from other products?
Mr. Anubhab: The existing companies such as Oracle viewer, Work expo, 3D tool, JT viewer are primarily providers of 3D viewers and our CADbro lite version falls in this category. These 3D viewers do not have any CAD functionality, analysis functionality or advanced features such as cloud storage. Our CADbro standard and professional versions have these functionalities and our Guangzhou office has more than 50 developers working only on CADbro professional for helping us to bring out a superior product than other 3D viewers.
The free viewers only offer the view function and only support neutral data. They do not support Catia Native files. CADbro offers the kind of functions that support over 25 kinds of mainstream file formats, which you can easily access & interact with 2D/3D CAD data without expensive CAD licenses. You can easily add dimensions, tolerance, symbols, or text directly on the imported 3D models. There are also diversified query & analysis tools in CADbro which help to detect any errors in the early stage product development to help save cost and time.
How is CADbro different from 3D PDF?
Mr. Sean: In my opinion, 3D PDF is a very good file to share in your supply chain, but once you export it, you cannot make any modifications. With CADbro you can still make notations and users can adapt requirements.
Mr. Anubhab: The basic difference between CADbro and 3D PDF is that in CADbro the data is dynamic even after the file is exported. Customers can do analysis, have section views and edit the data, which is way beyond what 3D PDF can do.
What are your plans for CADbro in India?
Mr. Anubhab: We launched CADbro in India on 23rd November 2018. We invited more than 50 leading companies from Pune and people from across different departments such as IT, Manufacturing, Quality, and Marketing. As part of the launch, we introduced the audience to CADbro and why they should implement CADbro. There was a lucky draw at the end of the event and the winner got CADbro license as a gift.
There is no defined market for our product and our aim is to create a market in India. Most companies purchase a CAD viewer to just view files as these viewers do not provide any additional functionality. CADbro’ s functionalities will help many departments to replace CAD with CADbro as it has superior editing features. In the past three months, almost 30 users chose CADbro in India to companies like JBM, Minda, GIC and to varied departments. We have confidence that more and more users will discover the charm of CADbro and choose us eventually.
How do you provide customer support in India?
Mr. Sean: This is the main reason we have partnered with Mr. Hazra as our distributor in India. His company has an extensive experience and can provide the best support to customers.
Mr. Anubhab: We have set up a customer support team and an ecosystem of 10-12 partners pan India who have their own support teams. This allows us to cater to customers in any region in India. Though CADbro is an easy-to-use product with an inbuilt help, we provide customers with one-day training.
Where do you see CADbro in the next three years?
Mr. Sean: CADbro is a very new product which was launched at the end of 2016. In the past one year, we have had very great feedback from other countries such as Japan, South Korea, and some European countries, especially the automotive and aerospace industry.
India is a big market for Automotive and Aerospace industry and we have high expectations from this market. We would like to replicate the success we had in Japan and South Korea where 500 users will pick CADbro. In India, by the end of 2019, we believe we can serve at least 100 users. And within 3 years, more than 1000 users can be armed by CADbro for better work.