Molded for Success

Vivek Joshi is proud to be a qualified metallurgist. So when his fascination for die-casting led him to a leadership role at TVS Holdings (TVSH), one of the largest die-casting companies in India, it was a perfect match.

“It has been a fantastic journey for the last four years, where we not only grew the company through a lot of adversities, but also started taking care of the core values of the company to bring it to a respectable, profitable growth story,” Joshi says.

Taking on his role as President and CEO at TVSH was an easy choice for him.

“It’s always a homecoming for me when I run a die-casting company,” he says. “TVSH is the largest die-casting company in India in terms of not only tonnage, but also the number of large machines we have.”

Joshi also says he was fascinated with the leadership of TVS Group Managing Director Lakshmi Venu and TVS Motor Company Chair Venu Srinivasan because of their passion for total quality management (TQM), systems and processes.

Reinventing Excellence

When Joshi joined TVSH, he soon discovered there were excellent systems in place and people who had been working there for a long time.

“However, getting to the core of die-casting, we needed to reset the basis in terms of metallurgy, processes, digitalization and IT,”  he says, thus launching his journey to restructure TVSH.

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“TVS Supply Chain Solutions and Sundaram Clayton have collaborated and co-created innovative supply chain solutions for over 15 years. By demonstrating core values of trust, value and innovation, we continue to develop solutions for our customers to become the most sought-after service provider.” – Siddharth Jairaj, CEO, TVS Supply Chain Solutions (GFS)

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To do so, Joshi divided things into three phases: fix, build and fly.

“Fix involved the restructuring of operations, machines and workflow,” he explains. “Now, we are in the build phase where we are growing strengths with a lot of talent pools from across the world.”

He expects to reach the fly phase in two years, when TVSH plans to establish a global presence.

The company has already started work on its global presence by setting up a plant in South Carolina, United States and a design center in Germany.

“I’m sure our growth globally with the American, European and Indian truck makers will make us one of the major aluminum casting solutions suppliers for them,” he says.

“We have one of the best R&D centers, the presence of large tonnage machines, an experienced workforce and a vision that can take us beyond what anyone can think of in the Indian die-casting industry.”

And Joshi is quick to say he is proud of the company’s abilities.

“With high-pressure casting, gravity casting and low-pressure die-casting, we have all the processes a customer needs,” he says.

“We have one of the best R&D centers, the presence of large tonnage machines, an experienced workforce and a vision that can take us beyond what anyone can think of in the Indian die-casting industry. Those were some of the factors that made me believe in the TVSH story.”

Belief in Culture

Not only proud of the product, Joshi also has tremendous respect for the culture at TVSH.

“Fundamentally, the TVS Group is well-known for their core values. They talk about trust, value addition, exactness, speed, agility and passion for the customer,” he says. “They hand hold you through each one of the values through a specific journey.”

“We don’t implement anything unless we understand the science behind it.”

He believes TVSH sets itself apart through its TQM thought process and base.

“Our Chai has been awarded the highest honor for individual contribution to the TQM journey,” he says. “We don’t implement anything unless we understand the science behind it. We also strive for continuous improvement as part of our TQM journey.”

Casting the Future

Joshi is excited about the future, particularly when it comes to his country.

“I strongly believe that the coming decade is the decade of India,” he says, noting the country is going through an infrastructure push and a strong growth story to reach a point where nobody can afford to ignore India.

He sees TVSH having a future in accelerating the adoption of sustainable light alloy solutions globally.

“We will not just be another aluminum die-casting component producer. We want to be the pioneers in the journey of light-weighting in the electrification era,” he says.

“We want to be the pioneers in the journey of light-weighting in the electrification era.”

This conscious shift to light-weight solutions requires plenty of research and innovation.

“We are getting recognized globally for our efforts in such designing, our state-of-the-art R&D centers and our strength in the talent workforce who can work with our customers to provide these solutions,” Joshi says.

TVSH is also moving forward on other fronts.

“We have undertaken a project to move our existing Padi manufacturing facility to a new location 50 kilometers away,” he explains.

“It will be one of the largest die-casting facilities in India, possibly in the world. It will be one of the leanest, greenest and best-connected facilities in aluminum casting operations.”

Apart from the impressive work culture and the strong workforce, Joshi believes rock-solid suppliers have been crucial to the success of TVSH.

“We don’t treat our suppliers as just a transactional entity. We have a partnership and a deep engagement model with them,” he says.

He points to TVSH being the largest consumer of secondary aluminum in India.

“We get this from smelters. Apart from this, we buy dyes and partner with technology suppliers who provide us with die-casting machines,” he says. “Finally, we have day-to-day parts and machining suppliers.

“Then we have logistical partners like TVS Dynamic Global Freight Services; we have massive containers going out of India every month. We work rigorously with these partners to ensure we get the best quality and most cost-effective products.”