Mercedes-Benz India is taking its lessons learnt in India to other manufacturing locations across the world. The company has decided to make the Indian model for assembling Actros trucks its template across the globe for commercial vehicles. “We have developed a CKD process for the global market. The Actros trucks assembled here has set the standards,” said Dr Wilfried G Aulbur, MD and CEO, Mercedes-Benz India.
The company has been selling luxury cars assembled in India since 1995. The process for putting these cars together is well-oiled as the parent has production facilities in five continents and CKD assembly plants in eight. In Pune, the company assembles the S-Class, E-Class and C-Class cars.
But when it entered the commercial vehicles space ? trucks and buses ? it was breaking fresh ground. Initially, the Actros trucks came into India as completely build units. It moved towards being assembled in the country over time and currently has around 30% localisation, including tyres, batteries, wheel rims, hydraulic and tippers.
In 2008, Mercedes-Benz sold 240 trucks and 15 buses in India and there would be close to 600 Actros trucks on Indian roads. The Actros range of heavy-end trucks is assembled at the 100-acre, Rs 250-crore Chakan plant. The independent commercial vehicle assembly line has an annual capacity of 1,200 trucks and buses per shift. Aulbur said this has become a benchmark for assembly plants for commercial vehicles.
The Actros manufacturing line was set up taking cues from the processes used in passenger cars. For material handling it used the Kanban concept, where small parts are issued as and when required by production. For production, it used picture catalogues that made it easier to understand the assembly process.
To ensure quality, the company used four quality loops that are use in passenger car quality process — self certification by the production operator, section audit of the product, product audit at the end of the line and finally, extensive product audit by quality. The Actros manufacturing is certified for TS 16949, ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001 and MPS along with passenger cars. Another innovation was the red table concept where the quality of defective parts are checked jointly on a red table with adequate representation from the production, logistics and quality team members.
Innovations like these ensure that the trucks that rolled out of the Indian plant were no different from what was manufactured elsewhere.
The company says there have been no structural failures on 580 chassis. These trucks have clocked 16,000 hours and 2,75,000-km run.