What are the hr policies and strategies of tata motors?

Answer 1

Tata Motors' R&D effort is that it is an attempt by an Indian company to build a product that can thrive in an open marketplace. "Your product has to be globally competitive, be it in technology, pricing, quality… everything. It has to compete with the best in the world. The Japanese have it, the Koreans have it and even the Chinese have been able to do it… in India, it is only fitting that Tata Motors does that. If they didn't do R&D, they would never survive," he says.

In the last decade, despite the success of the Tata Ace, and the global recognition it earned for its frugal engineering skills in creating the Nano, R&D remains its Achilles heel. And perhaps the only real reason-apart from quality-that could stop it from going beyond its tag as the world's tenth largest automobile firm.

In the past, the easy way was to do it through licences-that's how many companies in India have gone about their product development. But now, global competition is at Tata's door step.

"In some ways Tata Motors is ahead of the rest but it is also because the company is under threat," says a senior executive of a rival car company who did not want to be quoted. All the major auto firms-including Daimler, VW, Volvo and Toyota-have already arrived in India.

The man tasked with the responsibility of upping the ante knows a thing or two about setting new standards in technology. Dr. Tim Leverton, its chief of R&D, has a phenomenal track-record in the automotive industry. He was the chief engineer at BMW and helped build the new generation Rolls Royce Phantom. In 2006, he was also the engineering director at JCB, one of the world's largest industrial and agricultural equipment manufacturing companies and in charge of building the Dieselmax, the fastest diesel engine in the world. So what made him pick Tata Motors? "I was attracted by the ambition of Tata Motors and their strong commitment to backing that ambition with investment and a readiness to disruptively innovate. I feel that India is one of the most exciting business environments in the world for the next era and wanted to be a part of that," he says.

To bind all the different research projects together, Leverton has taken a leaf out of Apple's model of innovation. Tata Motors will now act as an integrator for innovations that have come from Korea, the UK or elsewhere.

Leverton regularly shuttles between the hubs-one in Pune and the other at the European Technical Centre at Warwick. And he keeps a constant eye open for innovative ideas from the larger eco-system. It is a pretty serious attempt at collaboration. So much so that Dr. Leverton says he vets every email that he receives from anybody in the world who claims to have made a technology breakthrough. "There is a team which follows up each and every claim," he adds. The hunt for the higher ground has begun

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