Cynthia Rodrigues

Jeffrey D. Sage, the chief operating officer of Tata Technologies, is justifiably proud of his company’s record. India’s leading engineering and design (E&D) and infotech services provider counts among its clients some of the world’s largest automotive and aerospace companies. That it has managed to reach this position of strength in quick time is evidence of its expertise as much as its ambition.

Mr Sage, who joined Tata Technologies in November 2003, has the pedigree and credentials to further extend the company’s capabilities in what is an extremely competitive industry segment. He has more than three decades of domain and technical knowledge, has worked in five continents with such blue-blood enterprises as IBM and General Motors, and has been instrumental in maximising Tata Technologies’ potential as a high-tech supplier to the global automotive community.

Tata Technologies began life as a subsidiary of Tata Motors, providing end-to-end E&D and IT services to its parent company as well as offering a subset of those services to leading automotive companies worldwide. "Our long-term association with Tata Motors gives us a significant insight into the way automotive companies function, their specific business processes, software products, service demands and business needs," says Mr Sage. "Furthermore, our association with the world’s leading automotive makers gives us a global view on business and technology. We put this to profitable use by concentrating our attention on addressing specific pain points for our customers."

Tata Technologies creates value for its customers by combining state-of-the-art technologies with a real-world understanding of engineering and manufacturing processes, thus bringing down costs and reducing time to market. The company’s main competition is in the area of niche-based work, but Mr Sage is not one to worry about this. "Few of [our competitors], if any, are yet doing the broad breadth of vehicle development we are," he says. "Our investments in people and infrastructure are very high and that’s a direction we are continuing to grow with. Some of our niche competitors aren’t established well enough to make that much of an investment, but we cannot assume that they will stand by and continue to let us lead."

A 30-to-50 per cent cost advantage in India has encouraged many global automotive companies to build their own offshore centres in India: General Motors and DaimlerChrysler have theirs in Bangalore and Ford has one in Chennai. Despite that, these big boys are increasingly trusting Tata Technologies to work as an integrated part of their engineering and design resource teams.

Adds Sage: "We realised that five factors were causing a dramatic increase in the need for cost-effective E&D: increasing number of models, increased vehicle content, increasing number of markets, shorter vehicle lifecycle, and increasing legislation covering safety and the environment. These factors make offshoring to Tata Technologies in India attractive for American and European automakers. We have the talent, automotive process knowledge, experience and advanced technology skills to significantly enhance their competitive edge."

Sage believes that eventually automotive companies will try to get self-sufficient enough to eschew external services. "In a way, we’re working in collaboration and in competition with them, but it’s healthy. To succeed in this business you have to stay ahead in the game and continue developing the next level of partnership and competency with these companies." To this end, Tata Technologies does business in allied industry verticals by working closely with a select group of IT partners, including Tata Consultancy Services, IBM-Dassault, Matrix-One, Tata Infotech, Tata International and Tata Zamil.

To meet and exceed its customer demand for world-class quality, Tata Technologies has embarked on a relentless drive to achieve global standards of service delivery, people processes and information security. The company recently became the first end-to-end automotive E&D services company in the world to achieve both CMMI Level 3 and People CMM Level 5 ratings. It was assessed at CMMI L3 in 2004 for delivery of services, and is well on the way to achieve Level 5 in 2005. Tata Technologies has also renewed its ISO 9001:2000 certification for service delivery and achieved BS 7799 certification for information security management. Additionally, it recently won an award for recording the biggest improvement among group companies under the Tata Business Excellence Model for the year 2004. All of these are pointers towards the building of a company focused on emerging as the trusted leader in its sphere.

Clients are so comfortable with Tata Technologies than not even the fact that the company does business with their rivals can shake their confidence. "In fact," says Mr Sage, "a lot of companies come to us and say, ‘If you didn’t do business with other automotive companies then we’d suspect your capability.’" On its part, Tata Technologies has done much to strengthen that comfort by instituting a stringent security process to ensure clients that the confidentiality of their work will be protected.

Tata Technologies is now expanding its objectives to target more companies in Europe. Meanwhile, it is also working on building knowledge-based engineering tools to improve the advantage to clients from a value standpoint. The cost advantage won’t last forever, especially with countries such as China working on their language and other skills to steal a march on India, but Tata Technologies is prepared for that. "To lead in the value part of the business is very tough," says Mr Sage. "You have to constantly reassess what your value is, instead of getting dragged back to the level of lowest-cost provider. I am looking at where we need to go next and have begun to plant some seeds in our company to make sure that, when that time comes, we’ve developed that next level of skill and value."

The company pays a lot of attention to the training of its employees. "Individual growth aligned to strategic goals through constant re-skilling in critical areas is the key objective of our training and development focus," says Mr Sage. The Tata Technologies’ Learning Centre maintains an ‘individual competency development plan’ which captures individual-development needs. The offshore facility at Pune includes three training facilities with the infrastructure to provide a combination of hands-on and classroom-based training, including faculty drawn from the best in the industry. Effective knowledge-management systems and tools have been put in place to consolidate past learning and share the same across the organisation.

Whether it means building partnerships with other companies, building on its domain expertise or its association with leading manufacturers worldwide, Tata Technologies is further cementing the path to global growth.

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Uploaded on March 9, 2005