From an ailing company to a market leader, Hella India’s turnaround has been a success story to learn from!
Just over a decade ago Hella India had been in the dungeons, with a long legal battle with its partners. It was a time when the organization which had been synonymous with lighting and other automotive and industrial solutions had begun losing business and most importantly, the people. Soon the legal tangles had been solved but what was left behind was barely a shadow of what Hella India was in its heyday.
It was 2011 when the doyens of the institution decided to put their heads down and come up with a strategy to turnaround and go back to its leading ways. Mr Rama Shankar Pandey, MD Hella India has been instrumental in this journey and as Hella India’s turnover grew multifold, it has been a great success story.
‘Who are we and why are we doing this?’ were some of the pertinent questions that the leadership asked itself as they implemented the famous Blue Ocean Strategy to engineer the turnaround. Instead of being dictated by the market forces, Hella India decided to take a deep dive in the business they had once been at the helm of.
Commercial vehicle lighting was one of the most neglected of the issues in road-safety which itself was quite out of the public as well as policy focus ten years ago. The lighting technology was archaic and it was either proprietary to Hella or just a plagiarized version of it.
“Technology and innovation were the two focal points of our strategy. We had to squeeze in 25 years’ worth of technology in our products. It was a challenge which would open a completely new market for us - Blue Ocean Strategy!” explained Mr. Rama Shankar Pandey.
In 2012, they offered full-LED tail lamps in the exact same design and proportions that had been prevalent in the market. And the tail lamps had a five-year warranty too. Hella had innovated not only in lighting technology but also materials and tooling which helped them build products that would be bulletproof for at least five years. This led to a big turnaround in road-safety as the perennially unlit trucks and CVs were now visible in the dead of the night and that too from a distance longer than ever before.
They also built retrofit-like solutions for projector headlamps for trucks as well as buses, offering mass customization solutions to OEMs without them having to change their designs. It was a risk investing in tooling, especially without a fixed market, but strategically, it was the right call.
Hella’s slogan of “Technology with Vision' resonated well with the early adopters in the automotive lighting market especially when the vision was all about enhancing road safety by effective and economical use of technology.
Speaking about vision, Mr. Rama Shankar Pandey said that “‘Making Roads Safer Together’ has been a path-breaking initiative that gives us a glimpse of how technology can really shape the future of road safety in India. While there have been a bunch of buzzwords like electric, shared, autonomous and connected mobility, it is true that today’s engineers have so much technology at their disposal that they can make a huge difference. Only if we allow them to!”
Connected cars help in generating data which can be analyzed to formulate a decision making ability that can possibly augment the human mind by assisting during critical moments and can be the difference between life and death.
“The day everyone will start believing in the power of connected systems and data, limbu-mirchi will be replaced by IOT” says Mr Rama Shankar Pandey. “People are by nature non-compliant and if we attach reward to good behavior, we can augur a paradigm shift in road safety in India. Imagine someone getting rewarded for stopping at a signal at 2am. If these drivers/cars can get discounts or sops in insurance premiums or service costs, it would be the ideal incentive for them to drive responsibly. Connected cars can also warn you of impending danger beforehand, thus mitigating human as well situational errors.”
“We are not lagging in terms of regulations. Policy-wise the government has brought us at par with international standards. When we couple that with technology like connected cars and machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can rise up the world rankings for road safety. That is the vision Hella India has for the future – Alert and Assist”.
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