Abhrasnata Das
Suresh Komirishetty, CIO, Mercedes-Benz India Ltd. in an interaction with Sudhakar Singh, Editor, CIOTechOutlook, shares his insights on the current evolution of the automotive industry, agile innovation strategy, ways to leverage BI & analytics, and more.
How do you see the current evolution of the automotive industry in terms of new technology adoption?
Automotive industry has always been an early adopter of new technologies. In the foreseeable future, the same trajectory is expected to be continued. Moreover, if we look closely, the automotive industry not only adopts the technology but it also fuels the evolution of the IT industry. When it comes to the evolution of automotive technology, three main sectors may be defined as areas where technical advancement is occurring: Car IT, Customer IT, and Operational IT.
In the Car IT segment, new technologies like gesture control and voice assistant are increasingly adopted by the automotive industry. Using these novel technologies, a user can now easily perform multiple tasks like closing the door, switching on the lights, changing the mode, etc. Other technologies like telematics, digital twin, autonomous driving will be few of the things to look at. In fact, I would expect the cars to have their own intelligence, emotions and personality one day.
The customer comes to us from different channels, and it's important that we provide a seamless experience to every customer. The ease and convenience remains the main focus of this space. So, technologies like marketing tech and data analytics will drive a lot of changes. Moreover, technologies like API and cloud will be beneficial in the coming days.
In the Production IT segment, technologies like AR/VR are becoming prominent in the production operations. Visual Analytics is another important topic, especially the quality aspects. Presently, robotics and blockchain also are being explored to ensure seamless integration especially in the supply chain area.
How are you driving the change for Mercedes Benz India?
At Mercedes-Benz, we have started an initiative called BCE that stands for Best Customer Experience. The team of Mercedes-Benz is continually innovating for the Customer IT segment, with a vision to deliver seamless interactions, both online and offline modes and also when the customer moves across the value chain. We have already introduced many products like car configurators, auto financing options for the customer to decide more easily and more effectively.
Moreover, we have also transformed our foundational systems, which is an epitome of transformation for us in terms of digital technologies. Today, we have successfully transformed all our business processes to enable the direct-to-customer business model, which means we actually sell cars directly to the customer, which is disruptive in the automotive industry.
How can an agile innovation strategy be established across the R&D process, right from ideation to a market-ready product?
Innovation is not a process, but a mindset and culture. At first, a firm must pay close attention to the mindset and culture that it possesses. For example, there is a common idea of “fail fast, learn fast”. This is to encourage and educate the employees that it's fine to fail, but it's more vital to try and try fast.
Furthermore, it is critical for an organization to adopt a product-oriented perspective rather than a project-oriented approach, in which end-to-end responsibility is maintained. This will instill a feeling of accountability, which will lead to continuous product improvement, ensuring that it remains relevant to the times.
At Mercedes-Benz, we also attempt to foster innovation in little pockets throughout the organization. As they happen in various areas throughout time, it is easy to locate which pockets are still relevant, and pick those that remain, to see how we can make them more resilient and consolidate them.
Lastly, when thinking about innovation, it is also essential to have the right kind of people involved. It's about mixing the people to contain both microscopic and macroscopic views. So, the innovation is on both sides, top down and bottom up.
Today, most of the automotive CIOs believe that BI and analytics will impact their businesses more than any other technology. How do you think it can be leveraged for maximum benefit?
Data, as Clive Humby famously put it, is the new oil of modern business. It undoubtedly powers many of the organization's operations, and it lives up to its billing as the “new oil.” Furthermore, data is also a new currency, because it not only creates the opportunity for the businesses to optimize their costs, but it also allows them to monetize their data.
When we consider the combined data of the car and the consumer in the automobile industry, we can see that it has a tremendous value. This data has the capacity to influence every business process across the industry. Today, data is no longer confined to measuring the results, but now, it can also be utilized to navigate the effective way of steering a business, through different means such as - NBA or NBO.
Data is also driving a lot of product innovation, and it plays a big role in decreasing friction across the product's lifetime and the business as a whole. For example, data generated by a car not only aids in the reengineering of the vehicle, but data generated across the corporation, such as in the manufacturing process, ordering process, or customer expectation process aids in the streamlining of sales and the whole business process.
Moving forward, how do you see the automotive manufacturers evolving in the future in terms of new technology adoption, and how do you plan to keep Mercedes Benz India traversing the IT adoption curve?
The automotive industry is going through a sea-change at all the three levels of product, operation and sales. In this journey, digital technologies have a significant role to play. These technologies are now substantially leveraged in multiple tasks like - defining a process or designing a product.
Today, the concept of connected automobiles and telematics is not confined to cars and users. This connection has expanded to connect multiple cars, and in the future it'll be between cars and infrastructure, and so on. This is now referred to as "car to x". As a result, in the future interactions, connectivity, and enrollment will be established among all linked devices, and the automobile will become one of them.
On the other end, autonomous driving is going to take a huge amount of tech inside the car. Moreover, with other things like gesture and voice control coming into play, it is safe to say that in the future, cars will be the supercomputers on wheels. I also think that in the future we'll also have a separate operating system for the automotive industry. In a nutshell, numerous changes are taking place in all different spaces and this will significantly influence the overall ecosystem of the automotive industry.
