The Hindu Business Line : Satyam sets up automotive centre in Detroit

The centre would have about 50 engineers, and focus on automotive industry-specific solution building and research and development, according to the company's Director and Senior Vice-President, Mr Subu D. Subramanian.

The Hyderabad-based software company plans to have similar centres in Chennai, Japan and Germany. It will invest $2 million (Rs 9 crore) in setting up the dedicated centres for automotive practice.

The ongoing investment year-on-year in these integrated centres would be $5-7 million (Rs 22-30 crore), he told newspersons through videoconference from Detroit, US.

According to Mr Subramanian, the Detroit centre would strengthen the company's position in the automotive practice, which contributes 12 per cent of Satyam's revenue.

The company would provide solution with the global delivery model and using a combination of outsourcing, system integration and consulting. "We will provide high value at lower cost using the model. Our endeavour is to become business partners at global level," he said.

Some of the areas of focus at the centre, which is located close to automobile majors Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler, would be automotive engineering solutions, automotive electronics, real time manufacturing, supply chain, automotive enterprise solution and digital manufacturing, he said.

Digital manufacturing leverages information technology to collaboratively develop manufacturing plan and manufacturing equipment simultaneously with the product. Design flaws, manufacturing kinks and inefficient processes can be hammered out and corrected early on when changes create little disruption of critical time-to-market schedules, says a company press release.

Mr Kenneth Taormina, who joined Satyam as Senior Vice-President in December, will be the Chief Automotive Solutions Architect of the Centre.