dolution

Tata Electric Locomotive Company started functioning at J’Pur in 1955 and was engaged in manufacture and supply of electric engines to the Indian Railways. Known as TELCO; it soon began to make diesel trucks in collaboration with World renowned Mercedes- Benz at the same location. TELCO duplicated the facility near Pune in 1965 and 1985 initiated a third facility at Lucknow. Today it is known as Tata Motors. The main activities at Telco consisted of manufacturing the spare parts and assembling these parts into Engine, transmission and the Truck: selling Trucks and accessories: procurement of raw materials required for manufacture of these parts as well as other indirect items: making drawings and designs of product, spare parts, equipment etc; maintaining a check on quality; ensuring proper upkeep of various equipments etc. In addition to these activities, TELCO management started as Engineering Research Centre (ERC) at Pune in early 70’s. Automobile policy changes initiated by Government in 1978, enabled TELCO to design and develop four-wheel products other than trucks to which TELCO was initially restricted. TELCO soon developed smaller Trucks, which could successfully compete with Japanese products. Encouraged by this success, TELCO came into market with products like Tata Mobile and others which were serving as passenger cars also. This range of vehicles known as Tata Family’ was manufactured at Pune. However, these products did not enjoy a great success. The other two Jeep like offerings Tata-Sumo and Safari were however, a great success initially. TELCO started working on design and development of a car in 1995. ERC was briefed to make a car which could compete with Zen, but should have diesel engine. With help from French & Italian designers, TELCO successfully launched Indica car by 1998. Later on, a large version Indigo was introduced. Unfortunately for TELCO, however the environment had changed and many other cards like Matiz, Santro etc were available to the customer, in addition to new models introduced by Maruti. So initially the car model failed. After a series of quality improvement, car model Indica succeeded. In 2004, TELCO became Tata Motors. In 2008/09 of company launched a small car at Rs.1 lac price – Nano, which would be produced at a new location. It also introduced several variants of models already existing. Also, Tata Motors also brought car models with engines procured from FIAT. Nano plant in Gujarat has been activated recently.

i. How do you think TELCO activities were organized initially? (3 marks)

ii. In light of the current situation, do you think Tata Motors needs to charge its organization structure? (4 marks)

iii. How would you like to effect this change? Why?