Tata Elxsi, Tata Group’s embedded technology subsidiary, is ramping up its engineering manpower in South to match the automotive design needs of its overseas clientele. While a Rs 100-crore own facility is nearing completion in Thirunavanthapuram, the company has announced new development centres at Coimbatore and Hyderabad too.
In automotive design products alone, the company’s order-books are bursting at its seams, with assignments from global names including the Fortune-100 companies. The latest development is its tie-up with the European specifications consortium Autosar. Some of the high-end automotive design products in pipeline are night vision system, headlights that adapt to the light intensity in the night roads, sensor system that studies and automatically adjusts to each traveller’s mood in seating position, lighting and air conditioner-settings.
“It is possible to consider developing scaled down version of these products for Indian upmarket vehicles, if the country’s automobile industry finds it viable,” R Natarajan, GM and head of design and development centre, Tata Elxsi, Thiruvananthapuram, said. This design centre focuses on automotive, multimedia and digital signal processing domains.
The Thiruvananthapuram centre, opened in 2001 with 30 engineers, now has 700 seats in its 52,000 sq feet facility. Another 1500 engineering seats will be added in a year or two at a 2-lakh sq ft facility, ramping up the manpower to over 3500 seats, Natarajan said.
The two new development centres at Coimbatore and Hyderabad will be set up in addition to the existing design centres in Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune and Chennai.
The Bangalore-headquartered Tata Elxsi claims the highest ROCE (return on capital employed) among India’s IT firms and the lowest attrition rate.
This is achieved through an HR initiative named `touchbase’, which takes the onus of each employees individual needs.
About 20% of the staff are postgraduates or Ph.D holders. Since the focus is on niche technology, the company nurses no big-city centric expansion plans. “We hire from wherever there is talentpool in embedded product design, industrial design and engineering, animation and VFX services,” the company officials said.
