Being a 100% captive unit of Daimler, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India (MBRDI) has grown immensely over the past few years. From last two decades, the Bangalore-headquartered firm has been offering strategic partnership and in-sourcing for engineering, R&D and IT services with a vision to become the Center of Excellence in Daimler for Engineering and IT.

In an exclusive with Team CVF, Mr. Manu Saale, MD & CEO, MBRDI shares his views and expertise on the trending technologies, challenges and digitisation in the ever-growing automotive industry and also MBRDI’s vast contribution to the parent body Daimler.

Excerpts:

Team CVF: MBRDI began as a testing facility with just 10 employees in 1996 and now you have 3,500 employees with full blown R&D set-up with plans to hire 1,000 more employees. Please share your view on the journey.

Manu Saale: Clocking two decades into any business is an achievement. Looking back at 20 years and recalling how we started with just 10 people, and 10 years into the business we were still 150 plus. Post 2009-10 was really the inflection point and the last seven years have been highly successful. We exactly know within the company how we use India and offshore capabilities to mutual advantage.

At the beginning it was about arbitrage, that moved to value addition, that further graduated to product leadership, meanwhile now it’s more about discovering new alliances, start-ups, agility from offshore and to live up to it.

We are automotive, more traditional but when it comes to work coming out of our India campus, we have stayed ahead of the curve. We have some predictions coming up for 2020 and beyond in terms of responsibilities and it’s very gratifying.

Team CVF: What would you really define as the tipping point for MBRDI?

Manu Saale: There are two things that are looked at qualitatively – first, the sponsorship from HQ that took a positive turn leading to a redefinition of the assigned portfolio for the offshore centre. Consequently the nature of work that was assigned became more interesting and challenging to the engineer.

I think somewhere during that time the quality of work that came our way, the size of the assignment that was shared was substantial and interesting. We had teams that actually were well placed and qualified to deliver on those assignments. On these lines, MBRDI has successfully taken on larger value based work packages and delivered them.

Team CVF: Digitization is the centre piece and may remain the same for next few years. Given your experience and exposure what kind of technological changes will auto industry witness going forward?

Manu Saale: Daimler actively discussed going ‘Digital’ much ahead of time – involving its International Engineering Centers in the action. India focused on digital vehicle development, visualising and analysing the product before a prototype was actually built. We also focused on computational skills for further development. That’s when we invested time and capacities within our simulation group, and now we have the largest simulation group outside of Germany (for both CV as well as passenger cars).

It’s a vision that requires tremendous computing, method development and simulation to be completed to scale the summit. But it’s a worthy and lofty vision. I think India is playing a significant role in digitizing the whole structure. If physical tests have to be replaced then computer simulations have to be that near perfect. To a great extent, India certainly is contributing to stay digital, so it is right to say the centre piece of the offshore action for us is digital.

Team CVF: What will be the focus areas for research at MBRDI in the future?

Manu Saale: There are three key focus areas: One is digitization. We are thoroughly involved in method development space which is like inventing practices and procedures in computer simulation methods that never exists. For example, how can I ensure that the design of the windshield of a truck is optimum much before the physical prototype is built? Typical work loop would be to design and test them in loops to perfect the design.

The second one is core know-how development, wherein the company and its India centre contribute to retaining such know-how through focussed insourcing

The third: Analytics is slowly taking great shape in terms of generating reports from development activities, production and customers. We have been contributing to the worldwide Daimler group in such activities.

Team CVF: Do you see Indian OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) building R&D capabilities such as those at MBRDI in-house in the future?

Manu Saale: OEMs have long realised that the product differentiators in the future are going to be different from what we have today so I see a strong build-up. Looking at the R&D capabilities of the Indian brands, all of us are going in the same direction. There is certain amount of IP and own knowledge that you need to be able to differentiate a product in the market in the next five years and that’s a trend that you will see.

Team CVF: What percentage of advanced research that MBRDI conducts can be directly implemented to the vehicles available in the Indian market?

Manu Saale: MBRDI is already involved in ‘series development’ topics, contributing in major aspects of engineering for our products. In addition, we have been focusing on innovation so as to add value to the assigned topics. Innovation is also a key aspect of our sustainability. From that perspective we have been focusing on innovation strongly in the last couple of years and that has been bearing significant fruit. From last year alone, we registered about 150+ patent filings from the Bangalore center.

When it comes to innovation, we have methods and practices in place to encourage innovators. We have a dedicated team and an environment that fosters innovation, giving young engineers the mind space, tools and techniques that helps them come up with new ideas leading to patent filings.

Team CVF: Telematics in India so far has been limited to track and trace, how do you think this will change going forward?

Manu Saale: We have been focusing on the global markets from a telematics perspective. China is a fantastic example because we see not just OEMs that are geared up with latest technologies to cater to that piece of work but also telecom infrastructure and the data providers alongside. It’s actually a marriage of these two that makes it attractive for the end user.

Talking about Telematics ecosystem, we would certainly wish for positive developments in the content provider space – to be able to make it much more accurate for the end user.