Smart innovations were the hallmarks of the Summit at Surat
IF ONE LOOKS BACK INTO HISTORY, THE prosperity and growth of developed countries has its roots in manufacturing. This is because manufacturing is the only vertical that has a multiplier effect on the economy — one manufacturing job creates three other jobs. Little wonder, why this sector is a core focus of the Indian government and comes with a campaign. All knowledge and technology emerge mainly in the manufacturing sector. With these strong statements, Dilip Gaur, deputy MD & business head, UltraTech Cement Ltd, began his keynote delivery at the Manufacturing Today Reinventing the Future Summit at Surat.
Manufacturing also brings with it additional powers. Besides offering high quality jobs and employment, it brings with it exports, continuous skills enhancement, and a global footprint. India, however, continues to be beleaguered with shortage of skilled labour and there is a fear that Make in India might not take off as expected. At a time when technical schools are burgeoning in China and Russia, a mere 5% pass out of such schools. China reached its peak in manufacturing success due to high availability of blue collar workers.
There are some new kinds of dangers lurking for this sector that it needs to be prepared for. “New forces emerging in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) are volatility of commodity prices, and natural calamities that disrupt (especially global) supply chain. Hence winning in the new era requires building scale, achieving cost excellence, acquiring market access rapidly including acquisitions, strengthening design and innovation scale, building a global footprint, focussing on blue collar re-skilling/training, supply chain excellence that translates into AAA (align, agile and adaptive), and building resilience,” adds Gaur.
S Saikumar, deputy MD at ITP Publishing India introduced the jury members comprising Dilip Gaur; Shesh Gupta, VP (technical), Birla Cellulosic, Grasim Industries; Sanjay Sarkar, president & COO, Birla Copper Unit, Dahej, Hindalco Industries; Sunjoy Podaar, joint executive president & unit head, Narmada Cement, Jafarabad Works; and Manish Kulkarni, director, strategic initiatives, BDB India.
About 14 companies had arrived in attendance for the presentations on five topics of Quality, Cost Optimisation,Technology, People Initiatives, and Safety. The companies were Essar Steel, CEAT Tyres, L&T MHPS Boilers, HNG Float Glass, Sew Eurodrive India, Gunnebo, L&T Special Steels & Heavy Forgings, JCB India, Suzlon (SE Elctricals India), Lupin Pharma, Ferromatik Milacron India, Reliance Industries, Batliboi, and Apollo Tyres.
In Quality, L&T MHPS Boilers depicted its quality enhancement of dissimilar grade ferritic alloy steel welding and how the team adopted automatic TIG welding process using ERNICr-3. Super alloys are high ferritic steel which meets the desired temperature and pressure. The primary application for such alloys is in turbine engines, both aerospace and marine.The team faced a problem when welding Grade 22 and Grade 91 materials as welding these two materials was challenging. Using different filler metals for welding, and applying the conventional welding consumable, it cleared the mechanical tests.
Similarly, SEW Eurodrive in its case study on gear box manufacturing facility faced an internal rejection of 2% (that is quite high) caused by minute mistakes. The company saw a way by dividing the entire setup into small islands thus bringing together the common parts and this led to fewer mistakes of wrong parts usage at assembly and less mistake of wrong assembly tools usage. The components were lined up as per Kanban.
The joint winners of the Technology presentations were interestingly steel companies. For Essar Steel, makers of the 1.4mt cold rolling complex, zinc coating is an important factor that needs careful attention. With customer demand shifting from 90gsm to 75gsm for cold steel, it meant redefining zinc coating capability on the lower side at continuous galvanising line to 75gsm. After a SIPOC analysis, it came up with ceramic
coated roll that Essar is now patenting. The exercise generated revenue of Rs 46.75 lakh per month.
The joint winner in Technology, L&T Special Steels & Heavy Forgings, whose aim is to indigenise nuclear components, discovered that forgings were difficult because of size, criticality, and quality requirements. Although it had manufactured one set of all forgings required for the steam generator, the challenge was maintaining the size of the shell and the maximum it could attain was 5.3m. A cross forging device was devised that changed the direction of the forging and could thus do 6.3m by using the manipulator and using the press to press it.
In Safety, L&T MHPS faced a problem of injuries to its workforce. The company invited Dupont for safety management. Addressing the three concern areas of communication, participation and consultation, it underwent total safety activities of all employees in EHS activities. Behaviour based safety was done through external training and achieved five star rating with 99.68% score.
Sustainability is often a tricky area to maintain. Reliance Industries, the fifth largest PTA maker in the world, found that it could achieve energy saving, water saving and CO2 reduction using IT tools. Since PTA equipment requires frequent flushing it found an alternative
chemical for the rewash and the result was reduction in effluent generation by Rs 1,500 metric tonnes per day.
Similarly, JCB needed to drastically reduce it energy cost and high cost of welding gas. It realised that the company could save money in blower auto operation (saved Rs 50 lakh/year and saw RoI in 17 days), shop floor overhead lamps (saved Rs 80 lakh/year), street light replacement (saved Rs 4 lakh/year), and welding gas saving (saved Rs 56 lakh/year).
High performance of teams is a constant demand in companies. Ceat Tyres showed that self managed work teams can work well in People Initiatives. Some business challenges it faced were slow ramp of plant, high breakdowns, and high conversion cost, while cultural issues where absenteeism, less connect with line manager, and large number of accidents. It began solving problems through attrition analysis and stay interviews and the solution was SMT (self managed teams), proactive welfare and grievance management, learning opportunities, skill enhancement.
The Swedish headquartered company, Gunnebo, found a large disconnect among employees. The learning process was unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent to consciously competent to unconsciously competent. It adopted lean thinking and created flow.
A common stress across companies is seeking ways to save costs. In the Cost Optimisation category, Essar Steel needed to reduce oxygen consumption in iron making unit, Corex process by 4%. Oxygen consumption was 530nm per ton of liquid hot metal. The company reduced consumption by increasing the metal to seven tonnes and indirectly reduced energy consumption and CO2 emission and cost of production.
They saved 21 nm3/THM of oxygen and in terms of money Rs 6 crore per annum. The joint winner in the same category, L&T Special Steels & Heavy Forgings is a high energy intensive unit that consumes Rs 5 crore of gas, electricity and other utilities. Cost optimisation is done by using regenerative burners installed in both reheating furnaces and helps save Rs 2.74 lakhs SCM/year. It also used self-recuperative burners and installed it in both the HT furnaces to save Rs 1 lakh SCM/year. Solar power generation was another method adopted to save on energy.
Each presentation was met with much applause as the innovations across categories were an eye-opener. The presentations were followed by the awards ceremony and participation certificates for everyone.