MANUFACTURING IN INDIA

RAVIND MITHE HAS A KEEN SENSE OF WHAT MANUFACTURING ENTAILS. HE LISTS DOWN WHAT COMPANIES NEED TO DO TO BE WORLD-CLASS

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INDIA’S SERVICE SECTOR CONTRIBUTES

54.13%, manufacturing sector 18.32% and agriculture 14.39% to the GDP. Make in India is designed to take manufacturing to 25% of GDP. For India to realise this, manufacturing has to play a leading role.

Even before GoI started serious efforts through reforms, organised manufacturing sector in India has put its act together and has spent efforts in putting their house in order. An average manufacturing company in India is yet to adopt world-class manufacturing practices to get competitive advantage. Many Indian companies use improvement initiatives on stand-alone basis without integration. For example, Kaizen, 5S, Quality Circle, Six-Sigma, etc. They are largely cosmetic.

Today’s plants are not isolated from the end-to-end supply chain which consists of plan, source, make and deliver. Hence nothing can be built in isolation. There have been examples of companies spending money on ERP with limited impact on manufacturing performance modules like PP and MM that are not supported by improvement initiatives that improves down time, cycle time, change over time, MTBF and MTTR. Practices like 5S, process capability improvement, SOP management, ability to do exhaustive CAPA and data integrity should be the key objectives of its manufacturing excellence programme.

INTEGRATING “PANCHMAHABHOOT”

As per Ayurveda and Indian philosophy we have five basic elements in nature, which are associated with health of human beings namely Prithvi (Earth), Jal (Water), Vayu (air), Agni (fire) and Akash (Ether). Any disorder in human body indicates imbalance of one or more of these elements. Similarly a manufacturing plant has five basic elements which govern its performance. These elements are Assets, Processes, Place, Utilities and People.