In vehicle manufacturing, you usually do not have separate "lines" to manufacture different vehicles. In fact, the very idea of a "production line" as a lay person understands it is flawed. It conveys the impression that the process is sequential with a single, well-defined starting point and ending point, and that each vehicle type is manufactured on a discrete and well-defined "line".vishvak wrote:So how does the system go about current issues?Mihir wrote: Newbie questions? Au contraire, it is you, dear sir, who has displayed a stunning ignorance of how modern production systems work. Hence the questions. Just want to asses exactly how deep the ignorance goes for someone to spout gems such as "an Arjun production line is something that has to be made locally, where as a T 90 production line is something which is imported wholesale"
That might clarify and remove presence of ignorance.
The least can be to state that it is secret.
Instead, what you usually have in a plant (or across multiple plants) is a number of units that specialise in the manufacture of a specific subsystems. Engines, transmissions, bodies, and so on. Other units simply receive parts from suppliers and ensure that they are ready for assembly into the final product when required. They all feed into one or more assembly lines that assemble the final product from these subsystems and components.
Now each production unit is a smaller version of the factory itself, with separate shops or lines dedicated to the manufacture of different components, which are then assembled into the subsystem. That is, multiple parallel "lines" again feeding into one or more assembly lines. Quite often, you will see a single line manufacturing more than one type of product. For instance, a transmission unit may have a manufacturing line to produce gears, one to produce the housing, one to assemble the transmission itself, etc. The unit may produce three or four different transmissions for different vehicle types, and production will be scheduled to manufacture enough of each to meet the demand from the final assembly line itself (40 of A, then 25 of B, then 30 of C, then 20 of A again, and so on and so forth). One car factory I know of manufactured four different vehicles, more than three types of engines and transmissions, and four distinct body types, amongst other things. Each product unit had just one assembly line, and there was just one final assembly line in the plant. These lines all used a variety of highly specialised machine tools, some of them made in India, most purchased from abroad.
The design and commissioning of such a manufacturing set up is a highly complex operation involving people from multiple fields. The fact that any company will try its best to utilise existing assets and units to manufacture at least some of its subsystems, if not the whole vehicle itself adds even more complexity to the task. Now the core design of the production system may be done in-house, but not without heavy involvement of engineers representing the manufacturers of different machine tools, consultants specialising in initial set-up and optimisation, an independent team for check-out and commissioning, etc. More often than not, the whole project may be handled another company, even a foreign one. Whether the product itself is 400% homegrown or not has little bearing on the matter.
Now think about HVF in a similar manner. They have been manufacturing armoured vehicles of different types for donkey's years. So when they decided to make the Arjun, why would they acquire new tools to manufacture each and every part and effectively set up a new, independent, factory to cater to it's production? It would make much more sense to leverage existing systems and machinery as far as possible in addition to new equipment and tools. Not all of this equipment would have been made locally, and foreign expertise would have been be utilised whenever and wherever it is required. The same applies to the T-90. The production line is not "imported wholesale". It will differ substantially from what exists in Nizhny Tagil, and will incorporate machinery from India, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and other countries in addition to the Russian stuff.
Now you see why the notion of a brand new Arjun "production line" built from scratch and locally at that, as opposed to the T-90 line, "something which is imported wholesale", is far too simplistic.
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