I knew the names of machines before I knew what they did. Growing up, visits to the warehouse and shop floor meant navigating rows of hulking equipment – gear shapers, hobbing machines, VTL’s, shavers and grinders – that my father and grandfather moved around like furniture. I could identify a Sykes or a Pfauter or a Gleason before I could tell you what any of them produced. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, component names, machine types, and the rhythm of a shop floor had settled into the back of my mind without anyone formally teaching me any of it. It came from growing up around people who took machines seriously.
Then one day I heard the term CNC. I did not fully understand what it meant at the time, but I remember sensing that the people around me were treating it as something significant – a shift, not just a feature. Years later, having completed my postgraduate studies in the UK and come back to enter the business properly at 25, I understand what they meant. The industry was not just getting new machines. It was getting a new way of thinking about what machines could do.
Our family business spans three connected activities: we manufacture precision gears, we trade in used industrial machinery, and we retrofit older machines with updated control systems. That last part – retrofitting – is where the CNC question becomes most interesting. Because what we keep discovering, across every machine we rebuild and every customer we work with, is that the mechanical structure is rarely the limiting factor. What limits a machine is almost always the intelligence sitting behind it.
The Real Constraints Facing the Manufacturing SME
Before discussing the opportunity, it is worth being honest about the environment most small and mid-size manufacturers are actually operating in.
The first constraint is space. Most shops in this industry work out of facilities built thirty or forty years ago. There is no practical room to keep acquiring dedicated machines for every new job type that comes in.
The second is capital. New CNC gear cutting equipment is a significant investment that the ROI calculation for a short-run, mixed-specification order book rarely justifies. Most SMEs hold onto older machines far longer than industry brochures would suggest – not out of stubbornness, but out of commercial sense.
The third constraint is the one that gets discussed least: the disappearing machinist. Not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of depth. Setting up a conventional gear machine – selecting the right arbors, configuring spindle speeds, calculating change gears, dialling in the job from scratch – is a skill that took years to develop and is now genuinely rare. My father’s generation understood these machines from the inside out. They did not just operate them; they could read them, argue with them, coax them into doing things the manual did not describe. That knowledge passed from person to person on the shop floor – never written down because it never needed to be. Today that chain of transfer has largely broken. Young people are willing to work CNC machines, and they are often good at it. But the foundational understanding of what is happening mechanically underneath the control interface is fading. When that generation retires, a very specific kind of knowledge goes with them.
These three pressures together – limited space, constrained capital, and a thinning skilled workforce – define the operating reality for most manufacturing SMEs today. Any honest conversation about where this industry is going has to start from here.
The Brain, Not the Body
Sitting across all three sides of the machine – manufacturer, trader, retrofitter – makes one thing very clear: for a large class of machines, the mechanical structure is not the limiting factor. What limits them is the control architecture.
The most visible example of this is the change gear. On a conventional gear shaper or hobbing machine, setting up a job meant physically selecting and mounting the correct combination of change gears to achieve the required cutting ratio, feed rate, and differential movement. It was a skilled, time-consuming process – and getting it wrong meant scrapped parts or worse. Today, a CNC retrofit replaces that entire mechanical calculation with software-defined axis control. The cutting ratio, the feed, the differential – all programmed digitally, recalled in seconds, repeatable to the same parameters every time. What once took an experienced setter an hour now takes minutes, without requiring the same depth of mechanical intuition.
Beyond change gears, CNC and PLC retrofits are automating axes that were previously manual or semi-manual – radial infeed, tangential feed, stroke length, cutter relief – bringing them under closed-loop software control. The practical result is significant on two levels.
Quantitatively this means faster changeovers, reduced setup time, higher utilisation, and fewer scrapped parts. Qualitatively it means consistent repeatability, stored job programs, and a machine that a competent CNC operator can run across a broad range of work without needing twenty years of mechanical experience.
A Sykes Gear Shaper that was once limited to a narrow operational range by its mechanical configuration can, with the right CNC retrofit and software programming, handle internal gears, external gears, step-gears, segment gears, helical gears and racks on the same platform – within the same floor footprint, with minimal changeover time between jobs. The iron has not changed. The capability envelope has expanded dramatically.
Across our experience working with manufacturers in India and internationally, even the largest OEM manufacturers – companies with the capital to buy new equipment – are choosing to convert their existing mechanical machines into software-enabled platforms instead. The economics are straightforward. A comprehensive CNC or PLC retrofit typically costs in the region of one-fifth of what a comparable new machine would require. The ROI case is not difficult to make, and the industry is making it. Software adoption in legacy machinery is not a niche workaround. It is becoming the mainstream strategy. The software is now the product.
What Software Is Actually Changing
It is worth being specific about what this shift looks like at the machine level – because the word “software” can obscure more than it reveals.
Modern PLC and CNC retrofits are not simply replacing one control panel with another. They are fundamentally restructuring how a machine understands and executes a job. Multi-axis synchronisation – coordinating cutter stroke, rotary feed, and radial movement simultaneously – which once relied entirely on mechanical gear trains and operator feel, is now managed digitally with micron-level precision. Job parameters that previously lived in a setter’s memory or a handwritten notebook are now stored as repeatable programs, transferable across shifts and operators. Real-time alarms, diagnostics, and feedback loops that conventional machines never had are now standard outputs of a well-executed retrofit.
The result is a manufacturing environment where quality is more consistent, throughput more predictable, and dependency on a shrinking pool of specialist mechanical knowledge significantly reduced. This does not mean the mechanical understanding becomes irrelevant – a retrofitted machine still requires people who know what it is doing physically. But it lowers the barrier enough that a broader base of operators can run a broader range of jobs, which is precisely what the current labour reality demands.
The direction is clear. The question for Indian manufacturers is not whether software will define the next generation of gear production – it already is. The question is how quickly businesses recognise that the machine they already own, rebuilt with the right intelligence, may be exactly what they need to compete in it.
The author is a fourth-generation professional working across gear manufacturing, industrial machinery trading, and CNC retrofitting, with experience across Indian and European manufacturing markets.
Yash Bright Marketing and Operations Head;
JK Gears and Machinery & Kunark Hitech Machining
