Massimo Vergerio, VISI Brand Manager, about VISI, Industry 4.0 and time as the biggest change

Vero Software software recently conducted their VISI CAD/CAM Conference for Mold and Die Professionals 2017 in Pune. Over 270 delegates attended the event. This event served as a platform for users to understand VISI product portfolio, roadmap, key release highlights, hands-on training sessions and lectures. Experts from industry and academia exchanged their ideas during user presentations, keynote talks, and social events. Sachin Nalawade, editor of Dailycadcam.com, had a chance to meet Mr. Massimo Vergerio, VISI Brand Manager along the sidelines of the conference.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Sure, I have been in the CAD/CAM industry for over 27 years now; after completing my Electronics engineering from I.T.I.S Camillo Olivetti University I joined Vero Software when company was very young. I joined as a developer and later moved to technical support. Looking at my passion and experience company gave me an opportunity to handle CAM products as a product manager. Next, I moved on to work in other countries like US, Italy, UK and Canada for few years. My role was creation and expansion of the re-sellers network. I also worked to setup offices and assigned partners in China, Brazil, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore and India. From October 2016, I am appointed as a VISI Brand Manager. Each period in my career path was very interesting.

What are latest trends CAD/CAM industry and how technology evolved since late 80’s?

Well lot of things have changed the biggest change is ‘time’, before we had more time to do certain things now everybody wants everything now! With the use of internet, Emails, Mobile phones everyone is expecting immediate response. Product development cycles have reduced in every sector. New materials are developed that are opening up technology in multiple ways. Additive manufacturing has begun to generate real excitement within the manufacturing community. For a long time in many industrial sectors, additive has been known as a great tool for rapidly prototyping new design concepts. But today, the technology is on the cusp of reaching a new, critical level of innovation.

New technologies and solutions have emerged and effected economic systems and social structures greatly. This era is of the mobile internet, as well as small, accessible and proficient sensors, artificial intelligence, smart and learning machines, big data, additive manufacturing, Virtual reality, composite materials, nanotechnology and robots. With industry 4.0 robots are gaining traction. Machines are getting faster and accurate, intelligent overall industry is moving in right direction.

CAD particularly is evolving in two main technical aspects one ability to do more complex designs and at the same time customers demand easy to use tools. Over the years what I have seen is that knowledge of people working in manufacturing industry is actually getting lesser, rather in the past there were more experts working in industry. Now for number of reasons the level of knowledge is getting lowered and everyone is expecting computers or machines to compensate for that gap.

Tell us more about VISI Product Portfolio?

VISI from beginning started as CAD/CAM integrated solution. We decided to go from freeform surfaces to hybrid modeling with solid and surfaces. We are not targeting generic CAD market, there is lot of competition and it was getting difficult for us to measure it in terms of potential. There are already big players in CAD space.

Because of our experience in handling customers from particular domain. We decided to concentrate on Mold and Die market. VISI is CAD/CAM/CAE software solution for Mold and Die industries, it comprises of various modules, so we start with very basic wireframe CAD system which is backbone of everything. VISI Modelling is the foundation of all VISI products and provides a robust and powerful solid and surface modeling system based around the industry standard Parasolid kernel. Combined with Vero’s surface technology, model analysis and 2D design, VISI Modelling offers complete flexibility to construct, edit or repair the most complex 3D data.

We have number of modules typically VISI Mould is complete mold tool design solution based on industry specific automation that guides the user through the mold development process. VISI Progress is dedicated software for the design of Progressive Dies and Press Tools. Industry specific functionality provides a more productive and efficient design experience. Helping the designer with intelligent decisions will reduce the potential for error and greatly improve manufacturing productivity. VISI Flow is a unique prediction tool, ideal for pre- and post-production analysis and con-current engineering of injection molded plastic components. We have VISI Machining modules for 2D, 3D and 5 Axis.

We have tried to subdivide applications to fulfill the needs of customers without asking customers to buy solutions that they don’t need. All solutions are very cost effective and customers are happy with the flexibility offered by us to go for the tools that are needed. If customer have some additional need in future or starts different type of jobs then he can add the required module. This is what works well for us since last 20 years.

How do you rank VISI solutions compared to other plastic flow analysis tools in market?

There are few very advanced tools or superior tools available for plastic flow analysis. They are high-end software and are very costly. Our tool is not competition for Moldflow or we are not trying to go against their market. CAD, CAM market is highly segmented. Our tool is used in combination with other tools in VISI Portfolio. It gives more functionality to our users to better understand mold design and its manufacturability. VISI provides a dynamic structure from where it is possible to work with either solid, surface, wireframe or a combination of all three without any restrictions. VISI Mold and VISI Flow are easy to use tools, doesn’t require CAE specialist to run our tools, even design engineers can use it to do the analysis during early stages of product development.

What kind of technology up-gradations we can expect from companies like yours. What can we expect in coming 4-5 years?

First of all for Vero family products we have development cycle of 6 Months. We do two main releases in a year. One is R1 followed by R2. During those intermediate months we do software updates. That includes small enhancements and bug fixing. The direction of product is driven by roadmap. So during the major release R1 we define roadmap based on two main factors one is key selling points and feature requests by customers. The direction of company at this moment is mainly trying to utilize available resources and technology. With number of acquisitions we are now team of 140 developers, they are not just working for the single brand now.

We are restructuring development in a way that the core technology would be shared with all Vero products. This will give us an opportunity to allocate resources on things that cannot be done in past. Other thing is that Hexagon is very much involved with us and they are obliviously pushing technology to new level. We are looking forward to use Hexagon’s technology with Vero solutions to better sink knowledge that would be useful to our customers. Our ultimate aim is to provide a product that would deal with mass majority of issues right from Reverse engineering, design, manufacturing and metrology.