Auburn Hills Firm Thrives Making Auto Design Efficient
The founders of one of Michigan's best-known names in software are enjoying continued success in their second venture.
Ranal Inc., founded in 1995 by Veera and Rakesh Mahajan, has added 50 people since January and has continued to grow in engineering services, software and staffing.
Manufacutring in general, and the auto industry in particular, may be suffering, said Rakesh Mahajan, the company's CEO. But he pointed out that "tough times require technical know-how," and his company's products and cservices "are helping customers decrease time to market." His wife Veera, the company's president, says one of the things that means is that automakers can "go sooner rather than later from trucks to cars."
Rakesh Mahajan was a General Motors engineer who founded Deneb Robotics with his wife in 1985. Ranal was formed in 1995 out of the staffing needs of Deneb, which wrote pioneering software that allowed industrial robots to be programmed offline. Deneb was purchased by the French manufacturing technology firm Dassault Systemes in 1997 and today is known as Delmia.
Today, Ranal has 83 employees, and more than 10 openings now, mostly in product design engineering and .Net and Java programmers. The company is also looking for experts in electronic medical records and aerospace engineering as it continues to diversify behing the auto industry.
Ranal has 16,000 square feet of space in a building just off University Drive that has more space for them to grow into.
Ranal's software is sold under the brand name CAMeLEAN (pronounced "chameleon") and includes modules for collaborative process lifecycle management -- the processes that used to be called computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing -- and program and product management.
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