Indian auto components industry excels in innovation, quality, sustainability
Auto Components India and its publishers, Next Gen Publishing, made the evening of February 15, enthralling and fabulous for the Indian auto components industry. The captains of the automotive and auto components industry made the ITC Grand Central, Parel, Mumbai, to bustle with activities and serious discussions on who had excelled and how did they do it. The occasion was the presentation of the Second ACI Awards, which has in two years become the most coveted recognition for the auto components industry. A grand jury selected from a large group of outstanding contestants who perceived as the most outstanding in 8 categories based on welldefined parameters. Hoshang S Billimoria, Chief Executive Officer, Next Gen Publishing Pvt. Ltd, told the august gathering that, “The auto components industry in India is flourishing and we are happy to be part of this exciting achievement both in the domestic and international markets. I thank the eminent jury members for their hard work, objective assessment and judicious selection of the winners from among a group of winners on several other counts. I like to congratulate and thank all the winners, especially the winners selected by ACI. I would also like to express the gratitude of Next Gen Publication to Shapoorji Pallonji and Mahindra Truck and Bus for their excellent support for this event.” The ACI team is thankful to the companies for choosing to send in their nominations for the proposed 8 categories. The nomination call for the awards was made in December 2017 issue of Auto
ComponentsIndia. In order to reach out to as many stakeholders of the industry as possible, nomination forms were sent to all the component makers through email and other communication media. The response was overwhelming.
The award selection jury met in Chennai on January 24, 2018. The decision-making process was like a game of tennis with equal hits and fluctuations and the ball was in the jury’s court. Finally, the decision was
made with utmost accuracy and objectivity. Such a selection was made very successful by the jury members: Kaushik Madhavan, Director, Automotive and Transportation, Frost & Sullivan, V G Ramakrishnan, MD of Avantem Technologies, Bhushan Mhapralkar, Editor, Commercial Vehicle, and Bhargav TS, Executive Editor, Auto Components India. Kaushik’s experience and knowledge about shaping up of new concepts, their unfolding into products and systems and their performance in the research labs, automotive workshops, on vehicles, in test tracks and on roads, were very decisive.
There were sincere observations by each jury member on the case study as nomination; the extent of details some nominees went into; the subject matter that was shared with the jury; the activity of the companies in addressing client requirements and in the process of attaining frugal engineering targets. Some companies even shared the case studies of the best processes and technologies that they carried out last year.
Many complexities evolved as the decision-making process progressed. The process involved long debates, strict tentative rounds and discussions. It was after a considerable effort that the results were arrived at based on parameters like technology, engineering, market performance and relevance to the industry. The innovative new components in the competition were those made available during the calendar year 2017. The jury decided to present 8 awards to do justice to all the constituents. Due to the tough competition, in the Technology Excellence category, 2 companies were selected for the title.
In addition to these awards, a special recognition award winner was selected from companies that excelled on multiple fronts. The following is the list of the Second ACI Award Nominations and Winners.