Body building – be it passenger or cargo carriers – is a cottage industry in India. Doubting Thomases travel on Indian highways across length and breadth of this vast country and you cannot miss trucks and buses being built on roadside. Namakkal and Karur in Tamil Nadu comes to mind immediately. Or go around the Maruti Suzuki manufacturing plant in Gurgaon, Haryana and you cannot miss massive car carriers being built on its periphery. No wonder, body building is a huge business consisting of unorganized players. If you know how to weld, then you can be a body builder in India. No jokes. It is a ground reality.
No wonder when KailashVahanUdyog Limited (KVUL) Vice President (Operations) ShivamArren boasts of “no body builder in India has a 10-member design team except us”, I sit back and try to assimilate. Luckily, I am at his corporate headquarters at Alandi-Markal Road on the outskirts of Pune and significantly his design team operates from the same premises. I ask him to lead me to the design department. Bingo, he was not bluffing. Yes, indeed he has a design department with men and machines at work!
Before I utter a word, Shivam cockily informs that his team has developed seven new products for Tata Motors’ International Business exhibition held at Pune in December in less than two months – yes, two months! No, not worked on anything given by the client, but from the scratch. Just not design, but execution of that design as well.
“We did it,” says the proud Shivam. The design team is led by Sunil Jadhav as Assistant General Manager (Design), who has been with KVUL for over 15 years. Vice President (Design) PrabhakarChaurasia operates from KVUL’s Pant Nagar manufacturing facility. One design each functions from Chennai and Bangalore.
According to Shivam, there is a tremendous pressure to cut costs and design superiority everywhere. Reduction in mistakes and a little diversion from the beaten track also leads to design superiority, it is believed. What is the rejection list of design at clients’ side? Less than one per cent, pat comes the reply. Pretty excellent performance, indeed. “We keep an eagle eye at the component level itself so that mistakes or badly executed components are knocked off,” adds he. While KVUL is a supplier to Tata, Ashok Leyland, Daimler, Mahindra Navistar etc., it has its own quota of tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers.
Given the newfound love for quality across spectrum, KVUL has been winning awards. For three consecutive years, it has walked away with honours at the Ashok Leyland Supplier Summit.
