Maruti Suzuki on a diet
Maruti redux. It’s not size that the $3.7-billion carmaker is revising, but weight. Maruti 800 was the first bantam-weight fighter to cruise Indian roads. Maruti Suzuki is now taking a leaf out of the past to gear up for what it claims as perhaps the lightest vehicles on Indian roads. In a move aimed at paring costs in the ongoing slump, each vendor of the carmaker is now manufacturing every component and sub-component bearing in mind the ‘one-gram’ principle. While Lumax is busy making its incandescent light components lighter by a gram each, Krishna Maruti, JBML, Shriram Pistons, Asahi India and other vendors are following suit. As for Maruti, it’s ringing in more savings per car and taking it to the next phase of efficiency improvement, from layout to design change. For company’s ‘one component, one gram’ campaign, “nearly 2,000 in-house suggestions towards design change were floated, of which 70 were found to be feasible”. Earlier, the carmaker gained new ground in efficiency by changing the layout of the manufacturing line wherein productivity increased by 40%
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