Moving from BS IV to BS VI in a little over three years was one of the biggest regulatory challenges the Indian automotive industry has seen yet. With the industry achieving this feat, new opportunities emerge for OEMs and suppliers alike. Cummins India, the diesel engine major,
In an exclusive interview with Autocar Professional, he says, “We introduced the equivalent to BS VI in North America in 2007. In the past 8-10 years, over a million vehicles with this technology have been running on the field with Cummins engines. So, the technology has been mastered, it has been matured and fine-tuned. The technology we are getting in India is the state of-the-art technology as far as BS VI is concerned.” Cummins uses the SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction) technology in all its engines. The majority of Cummins’ engines power trucks from Tata Motors, a joint venture partner of over 25 years and also its biggest customer. While a major share of business will continue to come from Tata, Cummins plans to leverage its BS VI-equivalent technology experience to add new OEMs to its customers list.
With localised BS VI solutions capabilities, the company plans to boost its exports business too. Currently, the company earns less than 10 percent of its revenue from exports. Cummins India’s net sales last year stood at Rs 5,526 crore. Cummins India’s cluster of plants in Phaltan, Maharashtra, upgraded technologically can help Cummins India to export components and engines to mature automotive markets soon. Currently, it only exports components to markets lagging behind India in terms of emission norms.
The BS VI norms have also created an additional market for after-treatment solutions, and a new opportunity for Cummins. “This was a market which, almost four years ago, hardly existed or was very small a business to even discuss about. However,in the next five years, it is going to be a multibillion dollar business for us,” says Ram. He adds that as engine families get more sophisticated technologically, they also can add in further increase of Cummins’ market share. “Then, we see the rise of certain newer technologies like the hybrid technology, partial electrification,full electrification and fuel cells. So these technologies could make some huge marks in the next 5-10 years,” says Ram about future prospects. Cummins India’s market share in the automotive segment is currently about 30-35 percent.
Global data crunching, in Pune
In the new age, as data gains importance than ever before, Cummins has stepped up activities beyond developing and building engines. Cummins India’s global data analytics team is the group which drives this. Data from vehicles running in North America, China or in the domestic market is being analysed constantly. The team consists of data experts, certain domain experts and mathematicians too. “They look at all this data and they look at certain algorithms and these algorithms look into these data and seek certain patterns based on certain criteria to figure out how well the vehicles are running or if we see some trends,” explains Ram. Once the team sees a new trend, they look at designing or calibrating a curve that would make the engine behave differently to deliver optimal results.
This team of around 300 people work in different areas like supply chain, quality, diagnostics. Cummins India plans to expand the team by at least 20-25 percent. As the team builds its capabilities the company is building its offering of services. “For BS VI, there will be dedicated people who would be working on those processes and based on the data collected we would be scaling that as