Even the world’s most known and popular automakers are constantly facing product recalls due to reasons galore: incorrect gear functions, dysfunctional automatic door locks, transmission issues, steering columns, and more.
Although such recalls help ensure the safety of car owners and the community in general, they can be highly costly for manufacturers and negatively hamper the brand value.
As defective automobile recall becomes mandatory in several countries, auto manufacturers need to improve traceability across the supply chain and garner more profound insights into defective processes to make this process seamless and standardized. This is so they can take corrective action in time.
Read on to understand more about the mandatory recall directive, evaluate the industry’s preparedness, and learn how a solution like Tracex can help.
The Mandatory Recall Directive
Since April 1, 2021, India has joined a host of other countries in making defective automobile recall a mandate. The number of complaints that will trigger a vehicle recall process varies based on the number of complaints received, the type of vehicle, and annual sales. The government has set different thresholds for different categories to ensure automobile manufacturers recall defective vehicles in due time.
Unlike earlier, where recall of defective vehicles was voluntary, this new mandate by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways states that auto manufacturers and importers might have to pay the penalty as high as Rs. 10 lakhs to Rs. 1 crore if they fail to call back defective vehicles even after a mandatory recall.
The directive will:
- Help streamline the process of vehicle recalls in India while making it easy for automobile owners to raise complaints via a centralized portal.
- Make the investigation process around vehicle recall, type-approval procedures, accreditation of testing agencies, and the obligations of manufacturers, importers, and retrofitters easy.
- Ensure motor vehicles are designed and manufactured per applicable road and environmental safety standards and are sufficiently safe for road use.
- Put a check and balance in place, improving the quality of components and parts as well as vehicles.
Industry Preparedness
Auto manufacturers in India have long been relying on technology innovations to improve the productivity of their workforce and the efficiency of their shop floor. Yet, they still lag when it comes to track-and-trace solutions.
Investments in ERPs are at an all-time high, but most ERPs only track product characteristics and not processes that lead to those products – causing manufacturers to lose track due to process errors.
- The lack of continuous monitoring and tracking of processes across the supply chain can result in high costs.
- Although a standalone system that acts as a single version of the truth is desirable, it isn’t available for most manufacturers.
- Special processes do not get tracked or often have a gap in data capturing and recording and/or linking to the output, making it difficult to achieve visibility.
- Processes are defined and validated but not really aligned with shop floor reality or effectively linked to the output.
How Tracex by Sapours Can Help
As the Indian auto industry flourishes, customer expectations of reliability across all aspects of vehicle performance are increasing. Since a delighted customer is the greatest brand builder, robust and safe manufacturing is an essential requirement to meet these expectations.
To achieve this, manufacturers need to invest in technology solutions that help handle the growing volumes of vehicles being produced each year while also embracing innovative business models.
Considering product recalls can prove extremely costly for auto manufacturers, a modern track-and-trace solution can help identify defective processes – whether related to design and software or OEM, Tier I, and Tier II vendors.
At Sapours, we launched a detailed survey of the market conditions, and our findings demonstrated that the automotive industry requires a solution that can assure parameters and enable transparency across the value chain to restrict damages due to product recalls.
That’s how Tracex was built collaboratively with industrial and automotive experts. The tool provides digital traceability for product and process parameters. Designed with IoT and blockchain, Tracex links assembly with critical components’ batches and consequently with their process record with built-in immutability.
More profoundly, here’s what the tool does:
- Helps provide immutable records across the entire supply chain and meet traceability requirements as enumerated in TS/ISO/VDA / Global OEM manufacturers’ Quality Systems.
- Offers a user-friendly, mobile-enabled interface to ensure traceability to the final product serial number – both in the push and pull scenarios.
- Records product quality process in a distributed ledger using a mobile-based application.
- Generates instant reports and analytics alongside integrating customer enterprise system with blockchain.
- Enables back-end integration of parameters for automatic processes.
Conclusion
As the Indian auto industry looks to comply with the new directive of mandatory product recalls, adopting advanced track-and-trace solutions can help streamline the recall process while curtailing costs.
A digital traceability solution like Tracex uses blockchain and IoT technologies, helping manufacturers get real-time visibility into the supply chain. Through real-time insights into various processes, they can receive indicative trends for data and ensure long-term validation of processes – thus limiting liability due to recalls.