Lessons from the Indica

In a couple of weeks from now, I plan to upgrade my car, shifting from the Indica I now own to, possibly, an Indigo or a Ford Flair. Or maybe even a Suzuki Swift.

I, however, want to look back on my Indica, both to make a few observations about the car in particular and Indian manufacturing in general.

I was among the early buyers of the Indica in 1999, and I have practically no reason to regret the decision even today.

On the contrary, as I was upgrading from my Maruti 800 at that time, the Indica diesel gave me a bigger car at much, much lower running costs.

Having travelled more than 100,000 km -- call me an Indica lakhpati – in this car, I can say without hesitation that the vehicle gave me tremendous customer value. I got what I wanted from it, despite its faults.

Even today, after 104,000 km, it gives me mileage comparable to my other car (an Alto), and I am not talking about the lower price of diesel vs petrol.

I am talking km per litre. Add the diesel cost savings, and this explains why I am looking at the Indigo as a first choice for upgrade.

I travel quite some distance to the office, and I am certain that Tata cars have got this aspect of customer value completely right. To sum up my overall experience with the 1999 Indica in one line: up to 20,000 km you get no problems with the Indica; between 20,000 and 50,000 you can expect one repair job.

Between 50,000 and 100,000, you can expect two or three, apart from the usual company-recommended replacements and changes.

In broad, quality terms, I believe that the 1999 Indica compares reasonably well with the M800, but not so well with the others launched around the turn of the nineties.

That's one reason why the Indica went through a near-death experience around 1999-2001 before the Tatas could revive its fortunes.

So what are the lessons from the Indica experience? I am sure the Tatas learnt several, but my own take goes something like this.

Top of my list: Strategy itself is less important than its execution. The Indica project was brilliantly conceived. With just one basic engine block, it was versatile enough to produce six cars -- a hatchback, a sedan and an estate, with a similar number of cars in the less popular petrol versions.

But the strategy almost went for a toss when the company failed to deliver on the execution front. Thanks to weak supply chain links, by mid-1999 the buzz was that the car had problems.

I can hypothesise why this may have happened: with the Santro getting in ahead of the Indica, the Tatas probably felt market pressures to deliver fast.

Net result: a car that was inadequately tested for quality. My own estimate is that it needed at least another million miles of testing before making it to the showroom.

This may have delayed its launch by at least another 6-12 months, but may have been worth it.

Lesson One, with hindsight: Better quality, delivered a bit later, would have saved it the blushes.

If, despite this, the Indica is now back on track as one of India's best-selling entry-level cars, it's because of another strength that has been little talked about: Ratan Tata's vision.

If Tata Motors had been run by any routine bunch of professional managers, the board would surely have pulled the plug on the project after the negative publicity the car got in 1999-00.

But with Ratan Tata putting his personal reputation on the line for it, and with the Tata group drawing on its long-term public goodwill, the car received the one thing it could not have done without, which is top management commitment.

That's really lesson No 2. Very often projects fail not because they encounter big problems, but because the top-level commitment that's needed to set things right is lukewarm. Luckily for the Indica, this wasn't the case.

Keeping the faith at a time when automobile journalists were waiting to write the car's obituary is not easy. In the case of the Indica, the company did not pay too much attention to what the media had to say.

Though they were not saying nasty things out of respect for the Tatas, they missed all its pluses, too. There is, of course, a reason for this.

Automobile journalists, by definition, tend to be  "Gee whiz" guys, who are more excited by speed and spunk in cars, not value.

They also tend to judge cars by absolute quality parameters, whereas any product should be judged by what value customers see in it.

This is why despite lousy reviews, the Indica moved back to the top of the charts once the problems got fixed and the car was relaunched with the V2 engine.

Lesson No 3: Knowing what the customer wants, rather than just what the critics want, can make all the difference. Not all customers are critics, but most critics are not customers.