The Hindu Business Line : Ford China teams get hands-on at Chennai unit

WHEN more and more Indian companies are looking towards China for its economic success and trying to adopt the cost-effective manufacturing process in vogue there, Ford Motor Company has been using Ford India's Chennai plant to train teams from Ford's China venture in various aspects of the assembly line.

Over the past several months, teams from Ford Motor Company's China venture - Changan Ford Automobile Corporation - have been visiting Ford India's plant at Maraimalai Nagar, to the south of Chennai, to learn about the manufacturing process.

Changan Ford will manufacture the Ikon at its plant that is coming up at Chongqing. Ford India produces the Ikon at its plant here.

Production at the Chinese plant is expected to commence some time in 2003.

Changan Ford is a 50:50 joint venture between Ford Motor Company and Chongqing Changan Automobile Co Ltd, which is a large automobile group in China.

The investment in Changan Ford will be about $ 100 million and the plant will have an initial capacity of 50,000 units per annum, which can be increased to 100,000 vehicles a year.

"The workforce (in the Chinese plant) needs to be taught how to make the Ikon. We have had different teams with different functions coming over to out plant for training," Mr David E. Friedman, Managing Director and President, Ford India Ltd, told Business Line on Saturday.

Rather than adopt a textbook approach for training the workers at Changan Ford, Ford Motor Co decided to give them hands-on training on producing the Ikon, which was designed for the Indian market and based on the Fiesta platform.

The teams from China have been trained in various aspects of the assembly line like stamping, body paint, assembly, and quality engineering. It is an on-going programme, although the number of visits from China has come down, now that the work on putting up the plant is going on in full swing there. Initially, when the factory construction was underway a lot of people came here for training - on using the equipment and things like that.

They will now be in a position to put to use the equipment in their factory once production commences, according to Mr Friedman.

According to him, some of Ford India's staff have also gone to China to help in putting up the factory. There have been visits from other markets - mainly those where the Ikon is assembled from the kits sent from here - too to Ford India's facility, but these are fewer in number.

The Ikon to be made in China will be basically the same car that rolls out of the Maraimalai Nagar plant, except that it will be a left-hand drive version. "Almost 99 per cent of the car will be the same as that made here," says Mr Friedman. There will be minor changes to the grille, essentially to suit the local taste. The Chinese also prefer a different kind of seat fabric.

According to him, the Chinese market for passenger cars is sort of similar to India's.

The heart of the market is the car in the size of the Ikon. In comparison, the Maruti 800 and cars in the B segment dominate India's passenger car market. The overall automobile market in China, including commercial vehicles, is much bigger compared to India's, mainly because the size of the commercial vehicle market is nearly four times that of the market in India.

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