CII to organize Int''l conference in Chennai for SMEs

CHENNAI: Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) would be organizing Autotech 2006, a two-day international conference here to explore the possibilities of IT in automotive engineering.

The event would be held in Chennai on the 12th and 13th of this month.

Informing this to the media at the CII (Southern Region) office in Chennai, N Mohanakrishnan, executive director (Internal Audit) with Ashok Leyland said that globally, the auto industry is considered as critical to all round economic growth, with significant contribution to GDP and obvious employment generation not only in the core manufacturing but also in the services sector.

“The auto companies, including the SMEs are going global and enhancing their business competitiveness in the supply chain and logistics by going global on souring and also use of the state-of-the-art processes. This has not only created a sound structure for the supply chain but have also resulted in the development of an agile logistics chain across the globe to ensure quality delivery of the products while meeting the time-to-market compulsions,” he said.

Mohanakrishnan said: “All these have become a reality for these organizations on account of their focusing on leveraging advantages of information technology and compressing the distances across the globe both for physical logistics and information dissemination.”

He said the conference would analyze the current scenario if leveraging of technology by the Indian auto industry, under various classifications such as optimizing the use of technology for improving the internal business deficiency, increasing the agility and dynamics of interface with the value chain on information sharing, and attempt to reach out to the customers.

“While the first two are in the stages of maturing in most of the large organizations in the industry, the SME segment has started catching up the best terms of leveraging. A few companies in the auto industry have started the initiative of “know your customer” by way of leveraging technology and are in the various stages of roll out and maturity,” he said.

Mohanakrishnan said that the initial pace had set in, in the Indian auto industry, in the areas of innovation, collaboration and leveraging technology, a lot remains to be executed across the value chain in order to create an agile and dynamic industry chain which should deliver visible value to the customers.

“Realizing all this, we, at CII (SR) felt the need for bringing into the front stage, an event of global best practices in the auto industry in the areas relating to innovation, collaboration and execution,” he informed and added that HP would be the technology partner for the event.

Speaking on behalf of HP, Pallab Talukdar, director of Enterprise Marketing and Alliance under the Technology Solutions Group said that the event would also focus bon the specific needs and issues relating to automation for SMEs and has created a forum for addressing these issues to the benefit of the SMEs in the auto sector.

“Both CII (SR) and HP have created an agenda in the 2-day event covering the entire link of the auto industry value chain bringing in the best practices in every part of it,” he added.

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