Jaguar Land Rover announced today that it is planning on building the first Jaguar sports utility vehicle (SUV) and in doing so create 1300 new jobs at the Solihull plant, which was having a £2bn new factory built at it when CIO UK met with Jeremy Vincent. Today's announcement sees a further £1.5bn being invested in the Solihull facility to see production double over the next three years it has been reported.
Sales of Jaguar Land Rover vehicles increased year-on-year by 9% the organisation stated today, its fifth consecutive year of sales increases.
As a result of its growing product range Jaguar Land Rover has become a truly global brand since it split from former owner Ford.
Vincent has already spun up to the IT at a £500 million engine building facility in Wolverhampton that has created 1,400 jobs.
"Jaguar Land Rover is delivering solid financial results and has good sales momentum globally," CEO Ralph Speth has said.
"Our manufacturing plants around the world and product launch programmes are on track."
Since joining Jaguar Land Rover, Vincent has been driving four major transformation programmes at a time that the company has grown significantly. It has been helpful that under new owner Tata capex has been made available for the CIO and the wider organisation.
CIO Vincent is direct and honest about the scale of change still needed. He readily admits that the six years of change has not always been welcome throughout the organisation.
"We are still on the journey of changing perceptions of IT and there will always be supporters and detractors," he says.
"Some of my stakeholders say 'I just want a system'," he told CIO UK in an interview.
As Jaguar Land Rover continues to accelerate growth, CIO Vincent has to meet growth and maintain a strong focus on simplifying the business and therefore keeping IT costs acceptable
"We are still mopping up some of the shadow IT, and shadow IT is still being created.
"When you make cars all over the world, you are going to have serious complexity. So I have worked on 'invest once and be scalable'. There are people who have not been convinced by that. So I say to them in 10 years from now, if everyone has different systems you will ask the CIO why the business is so complex. It will be because you have a different operating model in every part of the business with different forms of data."