Automotive

The client belonged to one of the largest industrial houses in India which had diversified into manufacturing of castings. The client was evaluating opportunities for growth and requested assistance from UC in defining a growth strategy in the casting space.

Client Benefit: A strategic roadmap for leveraging existing capabilities by examining adjacencies and value chain opportunities.  

The client believed that there were potentially many earthmoving applications across different types of projects for which either proper equipment were not available or not being used due to various reasons. There existed a potential to tap these niche opportunities and the client engaged UC to identify the potential for niche earthmoving equipment based on a detailed application study.

Client Benefit: A realistic assessment of user behavior and choices in terms of selecting specific equipment, identification of niche product positions for specific application areas, potential tipping points for greater adoption of specific equipment leading to the development of an outlook on the size of the opportunity for such equipment.  

The client was a leading needle roller bearing manufacturing company and was looking at aligning its operations to achieve its vision of becoming a billion dollar company by 2020. The client engaged UC to assess if the current processes were designed to help achieve the vision, whether the organisation was structured in a fashion that would enable achievement of the vision and whether the current performance measurement system attracted and retained the right talent.

Client Benefit: Alignment of the organisation with its stated strategy.  

The client was a large auto supplier having presence in 8 product categories and had plans to add one manufacturing plant every year and one product every two years. Top management, though very positive about the future growth of businesses, believed that the group was facing a number of critical issues such as absence of strategic roadmap at the corporate level, absence of clearly defined export strategy and the risk of organizational misalignment to sustain and manage growth at the corporate level. UC was engaged to define and implement a corporate strategy and the corporate organisation structure to support the defined strategy.

Client Benefit: Top Management could set a clear agenda for its business unit heads and gained insights into developing its markets. Business unit heads could understand the future of their respective product groups and an agenda for development of requisite internal capabilities as perceived by OEMs.  

The client’s auto and farm equipment business had a small presence in the material handling segment in the form of the ‘Forklift’ business. The client was interested in assessing the entire ‘Material Handling Industry’ in the country and developing an understanding of each of the individual segments within the industry with focus on product segments that primarily comprised of operator driven motorized vehicles that were mobile in nature. Senior leadership requested UC to assist in conducting this research and provide a perspective on the individual segments of the material handling industry over the next 3-5 years.

Client Benefit: Detailed product level insight into the material handling equipment industry in the country.  

The client had presence in a number of business lines, including advisory/ consulting, concept and prototype design and development of products, customized styling of automobiles, manufacturing, marketing and distribution of styling kits for Indian vehicles and trading of other accessories. The company had tremendous brand value and expected to touch a Rs. 100 Cr turnover in a 3 year period and therefore the client’s immediate priority was to grow the organisation so that it could capitalize on the market potential. To assist them in the same, client had requested universal consulting (UC) to “develop a blueprint for growth” for the proposed expansion.

Client Benefit: Organisation aligned with strategy. Creation of a ‘vision and value system’ for the organisation and streamlining the key processes such as operations, production, cash flows management, human resource management and performance appraisal.  

The client group had individual reporting systems in each of its companies and no common platform to examine the corporate performance on a regular basis. This was resulting in implementation of ad-hoc policies and higher costs were getting incurred due to unplanned and uncoordinated actions as the group was not leveraging on the possible synergies that may have arisen out of consolidating certain functions. UC was asked to conduct a diagnostic review of the ‘Corporate Performance Reporting System’ and to examine the consolidation of finance and accounts and procurement functions across the group.

Client Benefit: Revamped ‘Corporate Performance Reporting System’, consolidation of finance and accounts function across the group companies and synchronization, implementation and consolidation of the procurement functions of the group companies.  

The client was an auto component manufacturer and intended to explore the opportunities to expand its business and therefore requested UC to identify domestic as well as international markets (mostly European countries) for various auto components.

Client Benefit: Deep insights into the market demand, structure, player dynamics of the auto component industry, identification and definition of export markets in Europe, with detailed analysis on Belgium and insights on Indian excise and custom duty structure.  

The client was in the business of high pressure al cast components with operations at 2 locations and their vision was ‘to be a world class aluminum die casting company by continuously adopting new technologies available in the die-casting process, to help satisfy customers in terms of cost, quality and timely delivery. The poor profitability of one of their plants had been due to operating inefficiencies, rather than lack of demand, and management was keen to gear up the organization to meet growth targets while meeting expectations of profitability.

Client Benefit: Pilot implementation revealed that bottom-line benefits to the tune of Rs 1.34 crore could be achieved.  

The client was witnessing a number of issues such as variances between planned product costs and actual product costs since 3 years, lack of clarity on causes and types of variances, absence of a strong MIS, delay in obtaining variance information and poor sharing of information across the organisation, which was further compounded by a manual and error prone spreadsheet based system. UC was engaged to analyse the same and outline initiatives to address the issues.

Client Benefit: Elimination of cost variances, streamlining the methodology and development of MIS for costing to reduce error along with development of a robust stock management system.  

The client was a leading Indian manufacturer in the auto and construction equipment industry and requested UC to landscape the aerial work platform market in India, with an objective of potential entry in the product segment.

Client Benefit:A clear understanding of the market and product characteristics along with a roadmap defining the possible evolution of the market and an estimation of the opportunity.