Managing Socio Technical Change for Competitiveness in Indian Automobile Industry

Abstract

Prior to globalization and liberalization of Indian economy, Indian automobile industry was protected from any international competition. There were only a few manufacturers in every class of automobiles. These organizations were quite happy continuing with old technology and working practices. In 1990s with the liberalization and globalization, many multinational companies (MNCs) entered the Indian automobile market. MNCs had strong financial background, global markets, advanced technology, higher quality, competitive prices, customer satisfaction, teamwork, and healthy work culture. The automobiles launched by MNC s had advanced features, aesthetics, ergonomic compliance, and reasonable price tag. All this made the traditional Indian manufacturing organizations think and evolve strategies to come to terms with the situation and become competitive. They adopted cost-cutting as a strategy and took various actions like ban on recruitments, VRS, inventory reduction, squeezing profit margins, and improving efficiency and productivity. Improvements were made in various areas like technology, systems, structure, people and culture. With these initiatives, the organizations achieved varying degree of success. Some organizations survived while the others could not. This brings out the need to study the factors, forces and constraints prevalent in automobile industry with the aim of developing strategies for effective management of change. This study has been taken up with the objective of analyzing various aspects of socio-technical change like organizational systems, structure, culture, technology and people, and formulating a process for effective management of change in Indian automobile industry. The whole work is carried out in four phases: Survey on change management in Indian automobile industry, Case Studies, Modeling and Analysis, and developing strategies for management of change. A detailed survey on various aspects of change management has been chosen as a means to analyze the automobile industry.