Bharat Forge and Suzlon

The initiatives taken by Bharat Forge to transform it from India-only firm to a global firm are as follows; Bharat Forge is an established firm since 1961 with the government mandate to manufacture engine parts to meet India’s domestic automotive production needs. The company was running after basic manufacturer for domestic consumption into the second largest forgings company in the world. Their goal was to take over ThyssenKrupp of Germany and become number one in the world. The change took place from 1970’s with the Managing Director, “Baba Kalyani” with an undisputed domestic leader throughout the 1980’s. The company was lagging behind in the technology of the manufacturing system, with consideration of the Indian market scenario at a low cost with high quality.

Kalyani moved on first to climb on the Global market by signing the Rockwell International in US and his approach towards human resource management was highlighting his down to earth people systems. With all the consideration, Kalyani made himself take over the operations throughout three continents-North America, Europe and Asia. Kalyani anticipated that Indian manufacturing future would be heavily driven by sophisticated production techniques to meet the quality requirements at the global level.

Indian market was more of labour oriented manufacturing but the revolutionary thinking of Kalyani, replaced all muscle power labour with brain power and made investments on technology with an urge to gain future advantage i.e. Kalyani had correctly identified the core competencies and realized that technological up gradation would be the key reason for the firm survival in the long run. The impact of this strategy bought in transformation where in 85% of blue-collar workforce in 1989 to an 85% white collar workforce in 2000. This had a positive impact such that a die which used to produce 1000 forgings in the hammer shop was now producing 2500 forgings in the press line. With this transformation change,...