Schindler is the first multinational company to produce elevators and escalators in India.
Located three hours by car to the south-east of Mumbai in the Chakan district of Pune, the campus site includes an escalator plant, an elevator plant with its impressive test tower, a research and development unit, and Schindler’s very own university.
Schindler chose Pune because of its proximity to Mumbai as well as for the highly qualified local workforce (a result of the region’s local car industry). “You can’t have good quality without good people. We want to deliver best quality, so we need best talent. Our goal is to offer Swiss quality, made in India,” said Kulbir Singh, General Manager Escalator Operations, on a tour of the plant.
With its own local production site, Schindler wants to further advance its technological and manufacturing capabilities to serve the growing Indian market. “The fact that we started domestic elevator and escalator production, places us at a huge advantage today. Many of the orders that we have secured in the recent past were awarded to us because we can produce locally,” said Singh. Schindler was the first multinational company to produce escalators in India.
The honor of being a pioneer initially brought some challenges. “There was no supply chain; we had to start from scratch,” said Singh. The Indian crew was supported by Schindler’s global escalator organization. They trained the Indian engineers and helped them to overcome local challenges. Singh describes this collaboration as “a great example within the Schindler universe.”
In 2016, Schindler opened a new state-of-the-art Technical Training Centre in Pune to ensure that Schindler engineers and service technicians are fully trained and certified. In the spring of 2018, the opening of Schindler’s very own university followed, borne out of the belief that every employee is an ambassador for the Schindler brand. Schindler wants to be a best-in-class learning organization which acts as a differentiator to build competitive advantage through people.
The university offers interdisciplinary training and students include both engineers as well as sales staff, since an engineer needs to be able to interact with clients and, equally, every member of the sales staff needs to have some basic technical knowledge in order to understand what the customer wants.