Dassault Systemes, a Paris-based provider of lifecycle product management solutions, is working towards launching virtual automotive dealership simulators in the Indian market shortly, according to its India president, Andy Kalambi.
As in the real automotive sales sites, where a prospective car owner walks into a showroom, selects his vehicle and gets a sense of the interiors and exteriors before actually buying it, the virtual dealership enables him to do all this, too, including opening the doors to have a glance at the car’s features, but through a simulator.
“With the current economic slowdown, automobile manufacturers are finding it difficult to manage costs and are looking at slimming their dealership networks. The virtual dealership simulators will provide the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) an opportunity to save resources, besides managing their inventory in a much more cost-effective manner,” Kalambi said.
Kalambi was speaking to Business Standard on the sidelines of the sixth leadership series on manufacturing excellence – MAN’EXE 2009 – organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Hyderabad on Wednesday.
“We recently signed large deals in Australia and China for deploying virtual dealership simulators to Honda and Mercedes-Benz, respectively. We are currently in talks with all the major two-wheeler and four-wheeler makers in India for implementing the same,” he said, while declining to spell out the time line for closing the deals.
The over $2-billion company, which currently has six offices across the country and a development centre each at Pune and Bangalore, employing about 1,200 professionals, is setting up a centre of excellence on its Bangalore campus to bring in new aeorspace technologies to India by this year end, he added.
As part of its initiative to help IITs, polytechnics and other technology institutions upgrade their curricula, Kalambi said, Dassault Systemes was trying to bring in new technologies and embed these with the institutions’ training curricula. “We already have a tie with the Bihar government and are currently holding talks with the Andhra Pradesh government for the same. The response from the state was positive,” he said, without sharing details.
