- Salil Gupta, Director-India Commercial Operations, Allison Transmission Allison Transmission specialises in fully automatic transmissions. It has a wide range of products starting from 1000 series and going upwards to 9000 series. These are used by customers in various truck applications. At Excon, three vehicles were displayed with the company´s Automatics, catering to tippers and trailers, and all-terrain cranes. Salil Gupta, Director-India Commercial Operations, Allison Transmission, shares more in conversation with SUDHEER VATHIYATH. How does an automatic transmission help in off-highway applications? In the off-highway equipment, the duty cycle and terrain is challenging, thus placing extremely high burden of stress on the machine and the operator. This translates to high wear and tear, high maintenance requirements, frequent breakdowns and relatively low productivity. Under such harsh and severe conditions, the optimum transmission is a full automatic transmission, which architecturally, gives high reliability and productivity, and hence the truck does more work and generates higher productivity and revenue. What is the current market trend? Current market trends are increasing efficiency and productivity. More foreign players are coming in. In order to be competitive, all businesses have to bring-in higher levels of efficiency and are driving this by introducing new technology. Along with new technology, you tweak your business process to work with the technology and deliver higher efficiencies, which in turn drives down the cost per tonne, improves overall productivity, and the resultant returns are positive. What is your outlook on the market? Today, customers are the reason for business to exist and they are smart. All of us are trying to adapt and create our products and services to fulfill the customer´s requirement. So at the end of the day, the customer is king. I think customers will definitely embrace technologies that will give them better efficiencies for their businesses. It is a question of how fast it will happen. Our nation wants to develop fast, and we can achieve that based on how fast we mobilise ourselves in terms of technology and productivity.