Companies took centre stage at the Manufacturing Today Excellence Summit and provided a sneak peek into their manufacturing best practices | Team MT |
The Asian economies have to reinvent themselves to address new challenges and adopt new approaches. It has been said that in the next five years from cost led manufacturing economies like India there will be a business of at least eight trillion. That is great news for India’s manufacturing sector,” stated Raj Narayanan, CEO, Fertiliser & Insulator Businesses, Indo Gulf Fertiliser, Aditya Birla Nuvo, while delivering the key note address at the Manufacturing Excellence Summit held at Chennai recently.
ITP Publishing India along with Aditya Birla Group launched the four cities (Vadodara, Gurgaon, Chennai and Bhubaneswar) series summit titled, “Manufacturing Today Excellence Summit”. Supported by VDMA (German Engineering Federation) as the knowledge partner and BDB as Market Research & Business Consulting Partner, the aim of the summit is to bring together leading lights from the manufacturing industry and discuss the way forward for Indian manufacturing.
Having finished with Vadodara a coup of months ago the summit shifted its attention to the cities of Gurgaon and Chennai. Both the events were held with only one aim – To provide a knowledge based platform for manufacturing professionals and share innovative ideas that have helped improve productivity and effectiveness in their respective operations.
The summit witnessed teams from various prestigious organisations who presented papers/case studies on the best practices followed by their companies across key categories of costing, innovation, sustainability, people empowerment, safety and quality. All the participants were adjudged by a team of eminent jury members and the best of the lot were rewarded in a live awards ceremony.
The Indian manufacturing sector currently focuses on knowledge, skill based products, skilled manpower and of course cost based advantage. However, if the country envisages an aspirational figure of 15% growth rate then significant changes have to be made. Agreeing Narayanan added, “In the journey of manufacturing excellence from local to a global player it’s very important to follow best practices.”
“When you develop an ecosystem of manufacturing over a period of time you achieve global leadership position. And that’s the journey we all have to look forward to in India. Operational excellence, sustainable value chain, sustainable capital changes are value creations that need to be implemented in organisations to elevate them from basic to world class.”
Tony Henshaw, chief sustainability officer, Aditya Birla Management Corporation also emphasised on this very same point at the Gurgaon summit. Presenting a view of sustainability from the Indian and international perspectives he stated, “Currently, biodiversity loss is 100 times the natural rate and we run the risk of eliminating some of the ecosystems that support our wellbeing.”
Businesses can contribute significantly to help the planet, he said, if they operate inside tighter envelopes. “Business has a major role to play because the sum total of all business impacts will need to be reduced back within the planetary boundaries and that means standards and performance will have to rise dramatically,” averred Henshaw.
The Aditya Birla Group has taken a lead here and has adopted sustainable practices in each of its businesses. For example, one of their group companies, Novelis has already invested 500 million dollars to build recycling capacity which is already 50% of their input requirements and which will reach 80% by 2020. Even Narayanan’s company through product innovation came up with the concept of neem coated urea and today, 35% of all urea produced in the country is neem coated.
Such innovations will lead to India’s growth stories and this was testified at the summit as companies presented the best of their case studies. Top notch companies of the likes of Escorts, Exide Industries, SRF, JK Tyres, JBM Group, RSB Transmissions, Sona Koyo Steering, Essar Steel, AkzoNobel, Addision & Co, Kirloskar Brothers, Coco Cola, Hyundai Motors, TVS Srichakra, Nokia Networks, L&T Valves, Ingersoll-Rand, Sundaram Clayton, Toyota Tsuho Assembly, etc. participated in the event.
All these companies were adjudged on simple criteria of the content of their presentations, tools used to bring about improvements, how the improvements brought about benefits to not only them but also their customers and of course presentation skills.
Some of the presentations were really unique. For example, the JBM Group brought the entire concept of Why-Why analysis alive by enacting their challenges out to the audience. Escorts who presented a case study on people empowerment brought their union to the fore who detailed on how exactly they empower people in their organisations. Such interesting presentation formats made the entire event quite memorable.
Providing a succinct conclusion to the entire proceedings, J Ravikant, associate VP, Corporate TQM, SRF said, “The summit was interesting with wide range of cases, wide industry mix, good challenging projects and good engineering led solutions. It is very encouraging to see the strong commitment that companies are showing towards sustainability. However, where there are good points there are also a few minuses.”
Stating the same, Ravikant mentioned, “Customer oriented goals and means were not that clear. Also most companies only concentrated on improvements brought about in their organisations and not how these improvements helped their customers in turn. This angle was very important as for every manufacturer it’s the customer who is the end goal.”
This particular point was reiterated by Ranganath NK, MD, Grundfos Pumps India, right at the beginning of the Chennai summit where he gave a special address. He said customer satisfaction is the most important goal for any manufacturer and he can achieve manufacturing excellence only if there is an attitude of no compromise.
“Incremental innovation is vital to achieve manufacturing excellence. And the first KPI to do this is customer satisfaction. Let us give our customers what we would in turn expect from our vendors. Along with this, employee satisfaction, consistent growth and bottom line are the mantras that will lead to excellence.” We are sure companies would take this advice seriously and, in our next summit at Bhubaneshwar see organisations putting their best foot forward. We hope companies come forward and tell us how they are contributing to the Indian growth story by fulfilling their ultimate goal of customer satisfaction.