Staying On Track

R&d is front and centre of managing director Anurang Jain’s vision to ensure that endurance technologies, well, endures.

- Adrian Flores

In 2006, Anurang Jain says Endurance Technologies was nearly 50 times larger than it was in 1995. The Aurangabad-headquartered auto parts giant was also in the early stages of acquiring two diecasting facilities in Europe: Amann Druckguss in Germany and Fondalmec in Italy. “At the time, we thought that if our business kept growing, the profits would follow,” says the Managing Director.

Only a year later, that all changed. The world had changed. “We never imagined an event like the global financial crisis would happen,” Anurang recalls. “Most of our customer sales dropped and our business went down substantially in Europe as well as in India.”

What followed was a period of consolidation. Endurance reduced the number of plants from 19 to 16. It then outsourced a lot of its internal factory operations to its suppliers. Through such measures, it could save on future capital expenditure and improve return on capital while, at the same time, decrease prices from its suppliers because their overheads were much lower. It also started insourcing some products if the supplier was unwilling to lower the price.

Then Endurance implemented Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), an idea borrowed from the Toyota production system, but introduced by its customer Bajaj Auto. TPM helped Endurance improve the Original Equipment Efficiency (OEE) of its machines, and helped improve quality resulting in improved profit margins. “TPM involved everyone in our organisational chain, from the workers right up to me. We also hired a Japanese TPM consultant to guide us in our TPM journey,” says Anurang.

The consolidation strategy paid dividends.