How Autodesk Fusion helped Ecozen manage engineering complexity as it scaled

India loses an estimated 30 percent of its fruit and vegetable produce post-harvest. The primary reasons are straightforward: inadequate cold storage near farms and unreliable electricity in rural areas. Ecozen Solutions, a Pune-based agri-tech company founded by IIT graduates, built its product line around both problems.

Its Ecofrost units are modular, solar-powered cold storage units small enough for farming clusters to collectively purchase and install on-site. Ecotron, its irrigation solution, uses solar-powered submersible pumps that operate independently of the grid. The company's products have reached over 1.2 million farmers across 16 Indian states, prevented more than 19,000 metric tons of food waste, and reduced diesel consumption by an estimated 315 million litres.

As Ecozen grew, however, its internal engineering processes struggled to keep pace with its commercial growth. That is where Autodesk's involvement became central.

The Engineering Problem

Autodesk's initial engagement with Ecozen covered the standard product development cycle, concept design, detailed engineering, simulation, and manufacturing. Autodesk Fusion, its unified design and manufacturing platform, was the primary tool deployed.

The more pressing challenge emerged roughly a year and a half to two years into the partnership, when Ecozen's order volumes increased significantly, and production expanded across multiple facilities. Its product portfolio, which had started with two or three variants, grew as the company responded to different regional and customer requirements.

Each product variant carries its own bill of materials, a document that drives procurement, cost estimation, manufacturing sequencing, and compliance processes. Managing multiple evolving BOMs across a distributed team using disconnected tools introduced errors. Non-conformance reports from manufacturing were generating rework and slowing production.

"Every variant or every product has a bill of material, and that bill of material derives a cost, drives the processes in the organisation," said Parminder Singh, Country Head – Design & Manufacturing and Media & Entertainment (India & SAARC) at Autodesk.

What Autodesk Deployed

Rather than adding tools to Ecozen's existing setup, Autodesk extended Fusion's use from design into BOM management and full product lifecycle management. The platform spans CAD, simulation, CAM, and PLM within a single connected data environment.

The practical effect is that changes made in one stage of the development process are visible to teams working in subsequent stages in real time. When a design engineer modifies a component, the simulation team is immediately flagged. Results generated against an earlier version are no longer treated as current. The same applies when changes reach manufacturing; process sheets are updated to reflect the latest approved design before they reach the assembly floor.

"If somebody in design is making a change, the person in simulation comes to know about it. There is no gap in this," Singh said. "Imagine a person will do the analysis on old data — there are multiple priorities for each person, and this can bring a delay of two to three days."

The platform also supports AI-assisted design exploration. Where a small engineering team might realistically evaluate four or five design alternatives manually, Fusion's generative design tools use cloud computing to evaluate a broader range of configurations against defined performance constraints — load conditions, material costs, and manufacturing method compatibility — before the team narrows down options.

Two other AI-driven features Singh highlighted are automated 2D drawing generation, which Autodesk says is roughly 98 to 99 percent automated on the platform, and auto-constraint in sketch design, which flags geometric errors early in the design process before they carry through to engineering and manufacturing stages.

Outcomes

Ecozen reported savings of up to 30 percent on calculated investment across its design, engineering, and manufacturing workflows after implementing the Fusion platform. The company also reported a reduction in BOM errors, though specific figures were not disclosed. Internally, the consolidation of design, simulation, and manufacturing onto a single platform reduced the cross-departmental rework loops that had added overhead to each product iteration cycle.

All of Ecozen's current product variants are now designed, engineered, and manufactured on the Fusion platform. Singh noted that the next areas of potential expansion include plant-level design and digital twin capabilities — tools that would allow Ecozen to model and optimise its manufacturing facilities, not just its products.

"As they move into designing new plants, not only products but new plants, and making them more sustainable from a design point of view — also bringing the complete data from the plant on a digital twin to simulate and figure out the issues — that's the area in which we will be engaging," Singh said.

For agri-tech and climate tech companies scaling from product development to full manufacturing operations, Ecozen's experience points to a recurring pattern: product portfolio complexity grows faster than the processes originally built to manage it, and the resulting gap shows up in BOM errors, production rework, and delayed launches. Addressing it requires engineering systems designed to handle that complexity from the outset, not retrofitted as an afterthought.