Industry veterans deliberate on the initiatives for building the blue print for excellence | If the country has to grow it will depend on manufacturing and service.For the country to achieve sustainable growth, manufacturing must grow and we should all work towards this goal,” said Ratan Shah, group executive president and chief manufacturing officer,Ultratech Cement. Shah made this comment as keynote speaker while addressing the Manufacturing Excellence Summit at Vadodara, which was hosted by Manufacturing Today along with its presenting partner Aditya Birla Group.
The summit brought together leading lights from the manufacturing industry and discussed the way forward for Indian manufacturing. Supported by Vadodara Chamber of Commerce (VCCI) and SME Chamber of India, the event was well attended by a focussed audience group of 150. There was also a panel discussion. The round table on ‘Made in India – Manufacturing the way forward’ was carried in the previous issue, we now look at the second panel discussion on ‘From shop floor to top floor – The blueprint for excellence’.
Led by Ravind Mithe, partner, KPMG,the other panel lists included Sunilkumar Srivastava, president and unit head, Birla Cellulosic, Aditya Birla Group; Ketan Patel,DGM, head, Lean Sigma, Linde Engineering; Jayasankar Kuruppal, plant head, Ceat;Vinay kumar Agarwal, senior VP, API manufacturing,Alembic Pharmaceuticals; Vimal Vyas, corporate quality, regional black belt,Six Sigma, Alstom India; and NitalZaveri,CEO & director, Concept Business.
Starting off the discussion, Mithe asked the panel lists to enlighten the audience on the improvement initiatives undertaken in their organisations in the last five years.Starting the discussion, Kuruppal stated that they worked on two initiatives to get the ball rolling viz. quality- and people based management.“When we set up the Ceat tyre plant in 2010 the market was very competitive and the Indian industry highly capital. We had a lot of young aspirational people but there was a gap between the aspiration of the people and the way people’s roles were defined. To solve this issue the HR came up with an innovative concept called ‘selfmanage team’. Here, the operating people themselves managed the machine, took care of the quality, maintenance and operations.
This resulted in doing away with supervisors. We also notched up the quality in not just the product but also in thinking,planning and supply chain.”Drawing comparisons between working in Asian countries and India, Srivastava elucidated the importance of quality and how work cultures differ. He mentioned that in Aditya Birla, the primary focus is on cost and quality. For the same, they implemented Six Sigma and the First Pass Yield(FPY) cost power seal system uptime, which delivers consistency in the product. “After applying these quality initiatives, almost 30% of our products are now being deemed fit for exports. We also constantly monitor where we can reduce our costs and bring about more innovations in that area.”
Along with Aditya Birla, Patel too has been implementing Six Sigma at Linde.His biggest challenge was retaining people so they designed a standard procedure and developed a checklist to minimise the risk of people leaving the organisation.They further saved time by using the concept of lean. Elucidating the success story in his company, Vyas mentioned that there were organisational problems pertaining to finances and turnover in 2009. To rectify this they identified certain pain areas and in every region they elected a Six Sigma master black belt.
Kumar, who hails from a pharmaceutical company, explained how strict the regulations in his field have become and how their main goal is to reduce manufacturing costs and pass on the benefit to the customers. “With the help of operational excellence, our aim is to lower the manufacturing API and pass that on to the public,” he said. “A lot of companies usually implement initiatives like lean or Six Sigma, etc. because their competitors are doing so,” added Zaveri. “This does not work. There needs to be a customised approach. Another reason for failure in excellence is because of focusing only on the tool and not on culture building.
Lastly, it is necessary to keep the process simple and effective to reduce losses.”Thus, the discussion brought to the fore several improvements that can be implemented by companies facing similar situations.