Roads to Resilience

Business structure

Designing, developing, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and selling luxury vehicles are specialist activities. Traditionally, these specialists have been organised by function. However, at Jaguar Land Rover, their activities are tightly integrated across functions and management levels. One reason is that the end product, a luxury vehicle, is technically complicated. Design choices in one area will have consequences in others, and these interdependencies need to be carefully understood to ensure the end product functions as expected, complies with various global emission standards and other regulations, but also meets customers’ expectations in a competitive market. This requires the frequent coming together of functions and management levels to make decisions. Further, taking a new vehicle from drawing board to showroom is a very expensive process, costing hundreds of millions of pounds, and takes a number of years. Late – stage design changes, for whatever reasons, need to be avoided to ensure the product remains competitive and profitable. If such changes are required, the challenge is to carefully manage costs, time and quality aspects, while minimising disruption to other development initiatives and production schedules. Jaguar Land Rover deals with these challenges by having structures in place that facilitate cross-functional decision-making and rapid communication up and across the organisation as well as a portfolio approach to risk management. Reputation is of great importance to Jaguar Land Rover from a brand, Tata Motors, and wider stakeholder relationship perspective. The people and culture to support this have been developed since 2008, and improvements are continually made. However, without the timely and cost-effective development and production of competitive luxury vehicles, that customers around the world desire to buy and that meet all local safety, emissions and other regulations, there is no business to support it. The challenges Jaguar Land Rover faces in these respects are not all straightforward – some are complicated and others are complex. For example, designing, engineering and producing luxury vehicles is a complicated process. There are many parts that form the whole vehicle, and although there are clear and predictable cause-and-effect relationships between the parts, it requires a wide range of experts working closely together to investigate these relationships, consider multiple options for dealing with technical risks and challenges and, using industry standards, brand identity and resource constraints as a touchstone, to identify appropriate solutions through computer modelling and rigorous testing. Indeed, in 2012, Jaguar’s strength in this area was recognised by being awarded the top spot in the JD Power/What Car ? annual customer satisfaction survey. Complex challenges and risks relate, for example, to the unpredictable, uncontrollable, and irreversible actions and intentions of competitors and regulators, particularly in emerging markets such as Brazil and China, volatility in currencies and commodity prices, global economic conditions, and the ability of Jaguar Land Rover’s suppliers to operate effectively under these circumstances. Here the company cannot rely solely on expertise, process and analysis to provide the right answer, as causes and effects may be initially unknown and Strategy, Tactics & Operations

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Appendix A Case study: Jaguar Land Rover