A month into his new job Tata Motors chief Guenter Butschek has completed a whirlwind tour of the company’s facilities, taken part in an employee offsite and interacted with dealers. The 55-year-old is expected to take tough decisions, including a reduction in the number of suppliers, at the country’s largest automobile maker.
Butschek took charge as the automotive manufacturer’s Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director on February 15, a post that was lying vacant after the death of Karl Slym in 2014. The third expatriate to lead the company, after Carl-Peter Forster and Karl Slym, he also had meetings with Tata Group Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata and Chairman Cyrus Mistry.
“I was told to hold on to my passion and, of course to take the company to new heights,” Butschek said, referring to his meeting with Ratan Tata.
Formerly with Airbus group as its Chief Operating Officer, Butschek is assigned to lead all operations of Tata Motors in India and international markets, including South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and South Africa.
In a select media roundtable, he opened up with the hope that the questions would be on Tata Motors and “less about me.”
To be future-ready, the company will “undergo a major transformation process,” which would effectively review the entire setup, including structure, processes and manufacturing. The exercise would include brand repositioning, revamping products and expanding the global footprint.
“We are not going to reinvent the brand Tata Motors, but we are going to refine it in order to make it a stronger statement,” Butschek said in his first interaction after taking charge.
Butschek hopes to simplify the way Tata operates. “We need to be faster and much simpler in the way we are doing business; we need to take some of the complexities of our organisation out and need to create a much higher degree of agility.”
For Tata Motors, supply-chain management would be a strong focus.
Suppliers“We will certainly reduce the number of suppliers, because this is one of the few areas that make a statement that less is more. I would rather focus my energy and my resources on the development of my strategic supply partners instead of wasting on the ones who will always remain sub-standard.”
He also plans to do bring in more accountability and achieve economies of scale, while improving quality.
“We will do a holistic view, which would take a couple of weeks or months, but the end objective is more or less organisational efficiencies. The reference check is a number of key performance indicators, where I can objectively prove we have met our targets.”
On Nano, he said it was a ground-breaking and visionary decision. “We are at cross roads and we need to think of game changers; Nano was a game changer, may be the next generation Nano would be the next game changer.”