Looks like the violence at the Maruti’s plant has become a very sensitive issue and the company is looking forward to reduce the human intervention in their production processes. The company is trying to use the high end technologies in its Indian plants as it has in its plant at Hamamatsu in Japan. Currently, the plant at Manesar is 90 percent automated and the plan is to add another 50 to 100 robots in near future to make it a 99 percent automated plant. However, no concrete time-line has been set for this activity.
The press shops at the two plants in Manesar would soon become 99 percent automated. The company would then gradually automate all its plants across India. This would help them in having a consistency in the quality of their cars. In the last ten years, the company had already added more than 1500 robots to automate the processes. In fact, the company had stopped the manual production lines at its plant in Gurgaon. The competitors like Hyundai, Ford and Volkswagen have already automated their plants and Maruti needs to follow the trend.
The violence at the plant has resulted in few more decisions by the management. The company currently has more than 10,000 permanent employees and contract labour. They are planning to remove the contract labour and keep only the permanent employees for its core manufacturing functions. Improved technology is indeed needed to manufacture the new offerings from the company and reduction in human intervention would help the company to do more in less time with better quality.
Source – Economic Times