robust local supply chain to create a localized business
model that delivers good profitability, even at aggressive price points . JCB was very quick to completely localize its manufacturing in India, including
the engine, transmission, and cab. Competitors that hesitated to make this investment
ended up with an uncompetitive cost structure and huge exposure to currency fluctuations.
Blake and his team made multiple visits to India to get a nuanced understanding of
the manufacturing capabilities in the country. Instead of visiting companies with
similar low-volume manufacturing processes, they focused on visiting the high-volume
plants of Honda, Tata, and LG. They found the capability to be “mindboggling” and
well beyond what they had seen, even in the UK. As a result, in 2006, JCB undertook
“Project 50” to expand capacity from fifteen backhoes per day to fifty per day, without
interrupting production. The success of Project 50 and the market acceptance of the
3DX machine quickly led to Project 100, the creation of the largest backhoe manufacturing
facility in the world, with a capacity of a hundred machines a day, with an investment
of $100 million. Astonishingly, for a project of this size, it was executed within
eight months. The manufacturing innovations were so dramatic that they reduced the
assembly time from 105 minutes to 52 minutes. JCB has now replicated these process
improvements in the UK and Brazilian factories. As the India team earned its credibility,
it attracted further investments. JCB opened a new set of factories outside the city
of Pune to focus on heavy machines like excavators and wheel loaders.
Invested heavily in building an aspirational brand and a proprietary distribution
and service network with deep reach and capability . Like his father J. C. Bamford, the founder of JCB, Anthony Bamford had a passionate
conviction that the right products were merely half the recipe for success. The other
part was customer service provided by the dealer network, which by his standards was
woeful in both capability and reach in India. JCB India CEO Vipin Sondhi personally
drove a focused effort to transform JCB’s dealer network, with the support of some
of the most experienced service engineers worldwide. JCB established fourteen area
offices across India and four training facilities for dealer personnel in each of
the four regions. He restructured existing dealerships and added 9 more dealerships
and 145 new service points, bringing the total number of dealers to 57 and service
centers to 430. (In comparison, Caterpillar has 2 dealers with 112 service points;
Komatsu, 25 dealers with 54 service points; and Volvo, 12 dealers with 30 service
outlets.) JCB now expected dealers to meet stringent requirements in terms of facilities,
equipment, and investment in service engineers to deliver a world-class customer experience
anywhere in India. This network runs three hundred customer events and road shows
a year versus thirty by the closest competitor. Recognizing that operator training
is a huge issue, JCB invested in a residential school for training operators and then
showed its dealers how this could be a profitable and loyalty-enhancing new business.
JCB also arranged financing through more than fifty banks and financing companies,
enabling thousands of first-time entrepreneurs across the country. Today, over 40
percent of JCB’s machines are bought by first-time entrepreneurs. Moreover, unlike
most industrial companies, JCB also invested significantly in marketing beyond the
usual industry events and road shows. Much like a consumer company, it invested to
have a dominant 50 percent share of voice across media channels and signed up Narain
Karthikeyan, a young Formula One racing driver, to be its brand ambassador. Across
India, buying a “JCB” and becoming an entrepreneur are huge aspirations.
Used joint ventures and