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Kiron
Kasbekar*
It’s
a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
The Tata Group, which already runs one of the largest automotive
operations in India, has launched a new initiative which will
lead to closer collaboration between various group companies in
the automotive engineering sector. This pooling of group resources is likely
to yield big gains.
The companies that are involved in this initiative are Tata
Consultancy Services (TCS), Tata
AutoComp Systems Limited (Taco) and Telco Automation Limited
(TAL). Truck and car maker Tata Engineering is also involved
with some of these initiatives. Then there are companies in
related areas -- Tata Infotech, Tata Technologies and Tata Elxsi
in IT, and Tata Honeywell and Nelco in industrial automation.
TCS,
the biggest software organisation in Asia, has a long list
of clients in the automotive area: General Motors, Ford Motor
Company, Bajaj Auto, Mahindra & Mahindra and Ashok Leyland
at the OEM (original equipment manufacture) level, and Delphi,
Visteon, Lear, and Bosch at the tier 1 or 2 levels (that is,
the top rungs) of automotive component manufacture. Others
include names like GE Transportation Systems.
According
to Ravi Gopinath, head of TCS’s manufacturing and process
industry practice, the assignments cover a range of tasks,
such as design and analysis, modelling, simulation, and online
testing. This is not the right place to go into the technical
details of work done or in process. But it covers the entire
gamut, at the technical level, of design, computer-aided manufacturing,
product data management and so on. Beyond that, TCS has obvious
strengths in enterprise level solutions, including supply
chain management (SCM).
The
list of Taco’s customers also reads like a who’s who of the
world automotive industry. They include the biggest -- DaimlerChrysler,
Ford, General Motors, Toyota, and a wide range of major component
suppliers, among them Johnson Controls, Valeo, Visteon and
Yazaki. Tata Technologies too has built an enviable list of
overseas and Indian customers in the short time it has been
in existence.
Expect a better hit rate
Collaboration
is not a completely new idea. Some of these
companies have already been cooperating with one another
on an ad hoc basis. For example, according to Nitin Anturkar,
executive vice president at Taco, the company is collaborating
with Tata Infotech in the area of embedded systems, and has
already started work for a couple of customers since September
2000.
Taco’s
SCM strategic business group has won a prestigious award from
Honeywell’s British subsidiary for the supply of engine blocks
in collaboration with Tata Engineering. This project, which
began in March 2001, is an ongoing assignment. Says Dr Anturkar,
“We are confident we shall get much bigger orders in the future.”
The
new efforts are aimed at shifting from ad hoc cooperation
to more stable collaboration. That way these companies can
plan their bids jointly and expect a higher success rate when
they go for large contracts, especially from global leaders,
which prefer to deal with turnkey suppliers to having to manage
a multitude of individual component vendors.
go
to page 2
*Kiron Kasbekar
is managing director of The Information Company Pvt Ltd, and
editor of www.domain-b.com
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