TATA CO BAGS $100M JLR SOFTWARE DEAL

Chanchal Pal Chauhan, New Delhi
The Economic Times (Delhi edition) The Tribune

The Tata Group has started integrating operations of its recently acquired British marques, Jaguar & Land Rover (JLR), under its own umbrella. INCAT, a Tata Technologies company will develop critical software for the JLR operations. According to a source in the automobile industry, the deal is expected to be in excess of $100 million and will involve development of more than 1,000 software IT applications. INCAT will be developing these new applications to make a new IT landscape for JLR to migrate to Tata Motors’ management systems from the earlier Ford IT systems.

INCAT vice-president Europe operation Richard Welford told ET, “We would be developing an all new integrated system for JLR and would be taking our learning from the Tata Motors platform to carve an independent entity for JLR. The entire procurement of sales and service back end operations will be designed and developed in the next five years. We are at the product initiation stage currently and are expecting a employment of 400-450 INCAT staff for developing new JLR system until 2013.”

INCAT has bagged the order after it has successfully integrated the erstwhile South Korean auto major Daewoo Motors’ commercial vehicle operations with Tata Motors. Tata Motors had earlier acquired the commercial vehicle operations of Daewoo Motors.

INCAT will develop two key roles in the Ford–Tata IT migration process. The first one Application Transition Vendor (ATV), will involve a team of around 100 INCAT technical experts based in Land Rover’s Solihull site. The project will be completed in stages over the a period of 18 months.

The second, Application Management Services (AMS), will be an ongoing transition support for the next five years. It will require the active assistance of approximately 250 INCAT staff located both onshore in Coventry area and offshore at INCAT’s Delivery Centre in Pune, to develop the customised systems for JLR to have independent back end operations.

“We shall also leverage support from our group company, Tata Consultancy Services to develop these complex and exhaustive system for JLR to migrate from the currently used Ford Support System. We are already providing JLR long-term product lifecycle management (PLM) and engineering related services from past six years. Around 70 PLM consultants and engineers supporting JLR projects at the Gaydon and Whitley sites. The deep understanding will help to transform JLR IT systems close to the software needs of Tata Motors,” Welford said.