Kel Kearns is a Ford Motor Company veteran of 18 years. He sets up plants in different parts of the world. For the last two years he has been tasked with getting Ford India’s plant in Sanand, Gujarat, up and running on schedule.

Kel, as he introduces himself, is from Australia’s Gold Coast. What does he have to say about the India-Australia cricket series now on here, we start off. “Oh, no,” he replies, “I don’t want to talk about it.” But, he says, he would like to go for one of the IPL matches once the sixth edition of the T20 tournament gets underway in April.

Sitting in the temporary administrative office at the Sanand site, where the meeting rooms are named after popular Ford models — Figo, Focus, Endeavour — Kel takes us through the construction activity now on at the site.

Safety record

But first we are made to go through a safety drill, when the various procedures are explained. We are given safety vests and helmets to wear when moving through the construction area.

While on a tour of the construction activity, Kel says, with obvious pride, that “in January, we surpassed 10 million working hours on this site and we have had zero India reportable injuries.”

“In our Thailand plant, there were three million hours. Just to understand the scope of what has happened here, we have worked 10 million hours already and we haven’t had a reportable injury,” he reiterates.

Everything, Kel says, is happening on time and safely. There are about 5,100 workers on site, belonging to the two contractors — L&T and Shapoorji Pallonji. Kajima of Japan is the overall construction manager for the plant. “We have 50 safety professionals on the site to constantly monitor what is happening,” says Kel, 46, an aerospace engineer, who reached the rank of Flight Lieutenant in the Australian Air Force, before joining the automaker.

Capacity

Ford India broke ground at Sanand for the plant, its second in India, in September 2011 and laid the foundation in March 2012. The Rs 4,500-crore plant will have an initial capacity of 240,000 cars and 270,000 engines. Its first plant near Chennai has a capacity for 200,000 cars and 340,000 engines.

The steel structure for the press shop, where the steel coils will be stamped and cut into panels for various body parts, and the paint-shop are up. Nearly a third of the construction work is over. By the end of 2013 all the construction will be done and in 2014 the plant will get into pre-production prototypes. Commercial roll-out of the first vehicle will happen in the first half of 2015.

The Sanand plant will, even at the start, be larger than the first plant, where the initial capacity was 100,000 cars a year. “It is a no-compromise global standard facility,” says Kel. Because it is a completely new facility, Ford was able to draw upon the best of its various plants in designing this one. The body-shop will be fully automated.

Automation

“There is no fully automated body-shop for any OEM (original equipment manufacturer) plant in India and probably not in Asia-Pacific,” says Kel. In all, the plant will have more than 500 robots, in the body-shop and paint-shop.

The paint-shop will adopt a totally new technology — Rotational Dip (RoDip) — that will help lower the building cost by 8 per cent, bulk material inventory cost by about 4 per cent and personnel cost by 42 per cent and achieve energy savings of about 35 per cent. Overall, the new technology will result in a benefit of 16 per cent compared to the conventional system.

>ramakrishnan.n@thehindu.co.in

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