Brose India ramps up output for VW

Brose India is ramping up production of window regulators at its new facility in Pune for an export order from Volkswagen, and is preparing to start supplies to another international OEM in India for a new model to be launched later in the year. The temporary leased facility at Hinjewadi has an installed capacity for two million window regulators, both manual and electrically driven, plus 500,000 manual seat height adjusters that it will begin to assemble from September.

The company has already localised the window regulators it will produce here to “70–80 percent,” director Peter Gresch, vice-president in charge of development and electronics for the Brose Group, told this correspondent.

Assembly operations will shift to a new purpose-built facility a year down the line. There, other products from Brose’s vast portfolio of mechatronic devices for passenger cars will be added as the market for these takes off.

The company is scouting around for land in the Chakan, Talegaon, and Ranjangaon industrial zones around Pune suitable for a complex at which it is also considering collocating its product engineering and administration functions.

This will be the third “zebra” plant for Brose after its Changchun and Shanghai plants in China that produce both mechanical and electronic products on the same site, according to Dr Reinhard Meschkat, vice-president of production. Its older plants in Europe and the Americas are typically more verticalised.

The company also sees good prospects to export window regulators and seat mechanisms from this facility to Europe, as these are easy to ship and the labour costs are competitive against those in China, Meschkat said.

The present facility in Hinjewadi, close to Brose’s engineering and administrative headquarter, was a run-down shed that housed one part of a Demag Cranes facility here. It has been converted into a spanking new factory in line with Brose’s exacting specifications.

There is no separate quality, logistics, or manufacturing engineering departments; work here is team-based, and the empowered Brose staff on the shopfloor are fully in control of all factors that make for the quality for which this family-owned German firm is renowned worldwide, Meschkat said.