The Hindu Business Line : Toyota-Kirloskar gearing up to launch small car

Small-car moves
The company is making its spare parts delivery system robust and as scalable as possible for quicker delivery of parts.
Setting up training school for technicians.
Number of dealerships to be doubled next year.

Bangalore , Sept. 26

The plans may not be evident immediately, but Toyota-Kirloskar is slowly putting several pieces together ahead of the launch of its small car. While Toyota officials are still tight-lipped about the details of the small car project, several initiatives during the last few months clearly indicate that the company has chalked out a comprehensive plan before the pace for setting up the small car plant gathers steam.

As the small car project is volume driven, Toyota has started making its spare parts delivery system robust and as scalable as possible so that the parts can reach any part of the country as soon as possible.

Realising that there will be major shortage of manpower, it will soon set up a training school to churn out as many technicians as possible.

Maintenance Service

Even the number of dealerships, which is the key to sales of volume cars, will be doubled to around 100 during the next year. Another major initiative was the launch of the 60-minute maintenance service early this week, which will allow as many cars as possible to be serviced in the quickest possible time.

The time for servicing even a C Plus category car has been reduced to one hour from the earlier one day.

"They (Toyota) are extremely meticulous when it comes to setting up new plants. They start implementing their plans at least three-four years ahead of setting up the factory," an auto analyst had remarked when Toyota had decided to float a school to train technicians.

Each of these initiatives based on the Toyota Production System and Kaizen concepts, have the capacity to scale up several times over.

Service Parts

For example, the 10,800-sq-mt national parts' centre at its car manufacturing plant in Bidadi can in fact be expanded four times its current size to cater to the service parts for all current and future Toyota cars.

The Rs 24-crore parts centre will supply service parts to the regional parts' centre in Gurgoan and 26 service outlets everyday through dedicated Transystem trucks and is based on Toyota's principles of supply chain management using the milk-run concept. Transystem is a joint venture between Mitsui and Transport Corporation of India.

During the inauguration of the Centre, Toyota Motor Corporation's Executive Vice-President, Mr Yoshimi Inaba, had said that it is geared to handle not just the current demand but also the company's future expansion plans as well.

The entire centre works on the `small lot, frequent ordering and delivery' principle for smooth flow of parts in the entire logistics chain reducing inventory and associated costs.

More Initiatives

The amount of planning before each of the initiative was formally announced can be gauged from the fact that the pilot project for the one-hour express maintenance service was launched nearly a year ago.

According to Toyota-Kirloskar's Deputy Managing Director, Mr K.K. Swamy, the new project will in fact lead to increase in the number of vehicles being serviced.

"Now each of the bays can service between 10 and 12 vehicles a day," Mr Swamy said. Toyota is planning to launch several more initiatives over the next one year as the carmaker is planning to set up new factory sometime towards the end of the next year.

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