Tata Indica - The Making Of The Small Car

For instance, SBL, which supplied clutch-facings and rear (drum) brake linings for the Indica, developed them in-house. V.R. Janardhanam, President, SBL, remarked, "Despite its size, Telco has a lot of humility. It is willing to work with even the smallest of vendors to meet its targets."

A typical brake-lining usually went through the following steps: the raw material was converted into slabs; the slab was cut into the required length; the cut piece went through 2 stages of grinding for the inner and the outer diameters; then, the piece was drilled, and, finally, champered. But SBL brought down the number of operations to 3: the raw material was straightaway converted into pieces of required length, and the grinding was done to only the outer diameter. And the company saved 15% because of this single-piece flow technique. K. Pandarinath, Deputy General Manager (Research), SBL, commented, "Telco is a transparent company. It allowed us to use all their facilities as long as it helps develop a better product. Our engineers spent several weeks working with Telco's engineers on perfecting the brake-linings."