It is an age-old belief that manufacturing brings prosperity by creating goods and services for humankind. Indian economy has not witnessed a healthy manufacturing sector share for decades. It has been a modest 15-17% of the GDP. The pandemic disruption has further adversely affected Indian manufacturing. The post first wave period in 2020 saw a good return of manufacturing activities coupled with a healthy demand but was soon pulled back by the disastrous second wave in April 2021. However, the journey so far has brought forth many opportunities for the future through people, technology, and system innovations. Some of the innovative actions have been implemented, others being tested, and many are in the creation stage. The pent-up demand is soon going to come back with a bang. It is also expected that manufacturing will bounce back with its new avatar in the post pandemic period. This is because it is already going through a transformation. Nine new transformations have been identified which are being experienced in the manufacturing ecosystem which will strengthen it immensely for the next-to-normal phase.
Employee competency – The executives in the manufacturing operation covering this rare journey will experience a big transition in their role in the post-pandemic period. It is bound to bring in a greater degree of agility, resilience, stretch to deliver the extra bit, creativity and more in their delivery. Uncertainty in consumer demand during the pandemic has forced cost reductions which has led to restructuring of roles and responsibilities of employees, eliminating wastes in systems, stretching employees for upskilling, learning and adapting new competencies swiftly, remotely value adding and understanding the fast disappearing eight-hour workday to odd and long-hour working each day. Acceptable mediocrity of yesterday will transition into stretched value-added delivery through the new skills of digitization & data analytics in the new normal of tomorrow.
Collaborative automation – The post-pandemic shop floor will demand the optimal balance of human and machine skills for contactless material handling and operational cost reduction. This will be delivered by the human-robot collaborative approach of automation in all sizes of manufacturing industries – MSME, SME and large factories. Collaborative robots (COBOTS) have already started gaining momentum in India owing to its compactness, healthy payback period, modularity to manufacturing processes, flexibility, safety to operators and its integration with women empowerment in the shop floor.
Safety protocols – Daily temperature check, periodic COVID-19 tests, masking-distancing- periodic handwashing, staggered seating, tracking of post-factory interactions in mass gathering etc which are staples in current days are going to be the way of life for a long time. Adoption of contactless processes of handling products / tools / fixtures equipment to prevent human contact through digitization of processes and technology is going to gain momentum.
Industrial labor relations – The growing compassion amongst the industry leaders for the labour class in the tough pandemic period coupled with relatively weak bargaining power of the labour unions due to the job losses, would lead to a calmer industrial relation. The implementation of the long awaited reforms to the archaic Indian labour laws is likely to further transform the ecosystem of the manufacturing set up in industries. No working hour losses due to strikes, tool downs, go slows and other hindrances are expected for a long time to come. However, the burgeoning informal labour content in the industry workforce would continue till some stability in demand is experienced.
Robust supply-chain – Almost every manufacturing enterprise has experienced a massive disruption of supply and distribution of material. During the last one year each have either plugged the vulnerabilities or are redefining new strategies for a more robust supply chain. For future proofing from further shocks firms have reformed their sourcing, revised their manufacturing strategies, started basing decisions on more real-time data and strengthened their logistics. These decisions have been arrived at from the heavy data and analytics making the supply chain more resilient and agile.
Circular economy – The current prolonged pandemic has enlightened many, including the manufacturing fraternity in terms of the impact of supply- production- consumption on our nature’s ecosystem. The linear model of extract-produce-use-throw has been challenged more aggressively by the circular model. The soaring costs of metals like copper, lead and many more have forced the stakeholders to revisit the supply-production-consumption cycle. It has compelled the miners, product-designers, process-engineers, manufacturers, service-providers and finally the consumers to adopt the 10 R’s principles rigorously – rethink, reduce, repair, recover, recycle, reuse, refurbish, retrofit, remarket and rental. It has become imperative for every manufacturing enterprise to revisit its systems not only for improving the business bottom-line but primarily for the long term ecofriendly approach for humankind.
Machine intelligence – The current pandemic has forced process engineers to derive more insights from the large data being generated in the industry to revamp the manufacturing process using Machine intelligence. Accurate customer forecasts resulting in operating cost reduction, computer vision powered technology application for anomaly detection leading to enhanced quality, machine data for predictive maintenance of costly machines for improved asset utilization at minimum cost, use of smart cameras for supervision-less operations and many such new and focused approaches are strengthening the processes in manufacturing shops.
Reinforced lean – Lean with a philosophy of eliminating wastes to enhance the value content in systems will play a more critical role in times to come. In order to provide the sustained responsiveness to the volatile post-pandemic customer demand the conventional lean systems will have to be reinforced with a new key enabler. The likely volatility in demand will require transparent and comprehensive visibility of real-time information from all the actors (supplier to the customer) in the manufacturing supply chain. Organizations are already investing in this technology for their healthier business.
Speedy product-development – Innovation and concept-to-creation velocity in new product development processes have been the two key deliverables from the pandemic. It is predominantly driven by the healthcare sector. This has triggered the manufacturing fraternity to accelerate their product development business processes only to reduce the time to market. Compressing deadlines from years to months coupled with investment in flexible manufacturing systems is expected to improve the 3 Vs (Variety / volume / Velocity)
If observed closely these nine drivers of manufacturing are going to bring in greater degree of operational safety to workers, multi-skilled employees with round-the-clock commitment & engagement to the organisation, rather peaceful industrial-labour relations, more and more cobots for enhanced shop floor performance, leaner and still leaner business systems with real-time information for improved efficiency, big data driven resilient, agile & responsive supply-chain, data based decisions with technology intervention in operations, faster and still faster new product development processes and concern for the environment through circular economy initiatives only to make next-to-normal manufacturing more robust.
Dr. Ravindra Ojha is a Professor at Greatlakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon.