Consulting · Automotive components · Pune and Bangalore
115 data points, and four years of their own history first.
The short version
Advik makes automotive components for two-wheeler, stationary engine and transmission customers across India, Europe, the UK, the US and ASEAN. Management wanted to plan compensation and benefits properly, reduce attrition and lengthen average tenure by being visibly different from the companies they compete with for people. We analysed four years of their own salary and increment data first, then benchmarked across115data points in Pune and Bangalore — covering not just salary but leave, notice periods, hours, transport, canteen and insurance, separately for corporate and plant. They ran the exercise with us in 2018 and again in 2023.
The market is the second problem
Almost every company that commissions a compensation benchmark believes it has an external problem: competitors are paying more, and that is why people leave.
Sometimes true. More often what actually drives someone out is finding out that a colleague with less experience, hired more recently, is paid more than they are. Nobody resigns over a market median they cannot see. People resign over a number they were not supposed to know and now do.
Fix the external gap while the internal one is still there and you have spent a great deal of money making your best people slightly better paid than they were when they decided to leave.
So we started inside. Four years of salary and increment data, broken down by level, experience, education, promotions, appraisals, joining bonuses and functional delta, at each location. Then attrition read against tenure and appraisal history across departments and levels — not to explain individual departures but to find where the pattern sat.
Only after that did the external benchmark get designed, because by then we knew which gaps were worth spending money on.
Where the numbers come from
Compensation benchmarking in India is usually a desk exercise: published salary surveys, job portals, aggregated reports. Those tell you a range. What they rarely tell you is what a specific competitor in a specific city actually pays a specific grade of maintenance engineer, or whether they run a bus service.
| Primary | Direct conversations with HR teams and with employees at comparable companies, gathered through professional networks — the same way HR functions have always exchanged market information. |
| Secondary | Job portals, published studies, industry reports and company disclosures, used to establish ranges and to test whether the primary picture held up. |
The two sources were then compared against each other rather than combined. Where they disagreed, the disagreement was the finding — a published range that sits well above what people report being offered usually means the range includes a component nobody actually receives.
Roles were mapped by equivalent responsibility rather than by job title, which matters more in manufacturing than anywhere else. Two companies can both employ a Senior Engineer and mean entirely different things by it.
Benchmarking the things that are not salary
The brief was compensationand benefits, and the second half is where most benchmarking exercises are thin.
We benchmarked leave policy, notice period, working hours, working days, bonuses, transport, canteen and insurance — and reported them separately for corporate and plant functions, because the two populations value them completely differently.
For a plant employee in Pune, a company bus and a subsidised canteen can be worth more in practice than the difference in gross pay between two employers — and unlike salary, they are visible to a candidate before they join and to a spouse deciding whether the job is worth it.
Benefits are also where differentiation is actually affordable. Matching the market on salary is expensive and easily copied. Being the only plant in the cluster running a second shift bus is neither.
What we handed over
| 01 | Internal parity analysis across four years, by location, level, department, tenure and total experience. |
| 02 | Attrition patterns read against experience and appraisal history, to locate where the losses concentrated. |
| 03 | External benchmark across 115 data points, covering salary structure for corporate and plant functions in both cities. |
| 04 | Benefits benchmark reported separately for corporate and plant. |
| 05 | Gap analysis presented to management by location, level and department rather than as a single company-wide finding. |
| 06 | Recommendations on which practices to adopt as-is and which to adapt, aimed at differentiation rather than at matching. |
What we can and cannot tell you
What we can and cannot tell you
There is no attrition figure on this page, and the brief was about attrition. Advik adopted the recommendations and built an implementation plan. What happened to attrition and average tenure afterwards we do not know — we were not engaged to measure it and we did not ask. That is the honest gap in this write-up and it is a large one.
The strongest evidence here is the repeat. They ran this with us in 2018–19 and commissioned it again in 2023. A company that found the first exercise unhelpful does not repeat it four years later with the same firm. We would rather rest on that than on a claim we cannot support.
Recommendations adopted is not the same as implemented. We know the recommendations were accepted and a plan of action was created. We have no visibility of what was actually put into effect.
Primary data has limits. Information gathered through professional networks is current and specific, and it is a sample rather than a survey. Comparing it against published sources is how we tested it, and it remains a smaller sample than a commercial salary survey would draw on.
Constraints that shaped the work
Benchmarking creates expectations. The moment an organisation knows where it sits against the market, doing nothing becomes a decision rather than an oversight, and a study that identifies gaps management cannot afford to close is worse than no study. We reported by location, level and department precisely so that Advik could act selectively rather than facing a single number they could only accept or ignore.
The measurement gap is the real one. This is a people engagement with a stated people outcome — lower attrition, longer tenure — and both were sitting in the client’s HR system, measurable before and after. On the 2023 engagement we should have proposed a twelve-month review as part of the scope. We did not, and so the second exercise closed the same way the first one did.
If you are about to commission a salary benchmark
Look at your own data first. Four years of increments read against tenure, level and attrition will usually tell you more about why people leave than any market study, and it costs nothing but attention.
Then benchmark the benefits as carefully as the salary, and report the two populations separately. A plant workforce and a corporate function are competing in different labour markets for different things, and a single company-wide recommendation serves neither of them.
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Measurement note. Scope, methodology and data point counts are from our own project records. Benchmark findings were compiled from primary conversations with HR teams and employees at comparable companies, tested against published secondary sources. We were not engaged to measure attrition or tenure outcomes following either exercise and make no claim about them.
