In a landmark decision made earlier last year, Maruti Suzuki India, which had dropped the ‘Udyog’ from its title, this year appointed its first Japanese managing director, S. Nakanishi; already a dynamic, new management structure has formed with five core Indians working at crucial decision-making positions. This layer forms the second step of Maruti’s executive management just below managing director S Nakanishi.
With the new structure, two executives, one Indian and the other Japanese, will head the each of the five vital functions of the company which are production, sales & marketing, procurement, administration & engineering, and research & development. While both the Indian and the Japanese have the same designations of ‘management executive officer’, the major difference would be that the Japanese would be a member of the board of directors while the Indian would be invited to attend all board meetings. While the distinction is important, it doesn’t undermine the duties and responsibilities of both parties.
A spokesperson for Suzuki confirmed this new top level making it clear that this new structure would help “…develop managers in Maruti Suzuki to manage growth of the company and take top management positions.”
The new management structure has: MM Singh and M Ohashi—Production IV Rao and Keiichi Asai—Engineering and R&D SY Siddiqui and H Nagao—Administration Mayank Pareek and O Oishi—Head of Sales & Marketing
Rao and Asai take care of the service and quality departments which includes parts inspection. Special note must be made of Siddiqui and Nagao’s Administration department which is important to Maruti in terms of the yielding of information technology, finance and human resource. The youngest member in this executive group, Mayank Pareek, has been designated as the executive officer with important responsibilities as a management executive officer.
In the procurement department, exactly the opposite is true and S. Maitra who is a management executive officer heads the department along with Noriyuki Fujita, Japanese, whose designation is executive officer but is not a director on the board.
This new configuration takes into account the new management philosophy born in the US and adopted by Suzuki Motors of Japan which holds 54.2 per cent of Maruti’s equity. It basically visualizes smaller boards of directors while expanding the roles and responsibilities at the top level. Also, decision-making powers are given to a larger group regardless of the group’s constituents not being directors on the board.