KPIT looks at efficient means of transport

Ever surging crude oil prices has pushed the Indian economy to a corner and escalated the inflation rates to cross 11.5 per cent mark, not to forget the plight of the common man. Petrol and diesel prices have jumped and commuting has never been more arduous in recent times. With such a tough road ahead for all of us, automotive sector holds the key.

KPIT Cummins Infosystems Limited is a trusted name in the automotive industry and has partnered with automotive customers globally to bring down product development lifecycle and can be called the “Brains behind the Cars”. In June 2008, KPIT Cummins partnered with SAP to focus on industrial machinery and automotive verticals by coming up with a Center Of Excellence for SAP Solutions in the Automotive domain.

This announcement comes not as a surprise as this entity has been mainly responsible for providing software for the automotive entities and has 30 Tier I and Tier II automotive vendors and 13 automotive OEMs in its kitty. At a time when this sector is being watched closely, Ravi Pandit, chairman and Group CEO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems Limited, spoke to Prasad Ramasubramanian of CyberMedia News on what lies in store for automotive sector.

What was the rationale behind the initiative in partnership with SAP to set up a center of excellence?

See, 90 per cent of our business is in what we call the mobile equipment industry which includes car, which includes trucks, tractors, mining equipment, farm equipment and so anything which is a mobile and anything which is equipment, we work with them. We work with chip companies and you can say that our customer category has automotive and industries like farm equipment etc and within this the largest contributor is purely automotive industry. Globally we work with 12 to 13 global OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) like the Fords etc and so this is an area of very sharp focus for us. The center of excellence only augments that focus for us. The current work that we do for this industry is largely in the embedded software and chip design space

Could you explain this further?

What is happening is that embedded systems is getting integrated with the ERP and the ERP is getting connected with the Business Intelligence and so there is a lot of connectivity between these three modules and the automotive sector actually draws a lot on that.

What would happen at the center of excellence?

Important initiatives are taking place as better management at the shop level would happen and at the lowest level we are building technology and there are a lot of challenges in each sector are unique and you cannot come out with general solutions for these problems. You have to bring industry specific solutions and companies today are focusing on automotive industry and that’s why this center of excellence has greater relevance for us.

Your take on the extensive talk on fuel efficiency and oil prices increasing at a blistering pace?

There are a couple of things. Fuel prices are going up globally and that is one trend, and second is the general discomfort about the environment effects due to combustion is also going up rapidly. There is a need for us to come out with more efficient means of transport and so the mobile equipments that I talked to you about would have to be done more efficiently. Questions that would come up is, can we come up with a different fuel that would run well? For example the hydrogen fuel could be utilized. Secondly, can we come up with technology that uses gasoline more efficiently which is the hybrid car? Can we otherwise make the cars more efficient so that we get more out of it? We are working in all those areas and we believe that no matter how expensive the fuel becomes, people would want to go from place A to place B, so the transport would continue. It would have to be more efficient and fueled by some fuel.

Are we going to increasingly focus on alternate mediums of energy and fuel in future?

Definitely, emission related norms would be the key and we have been working in that area for the past few years.