Go Lean to remain competitive
NewKerala.com
Hyderabad: Captains of industry should adopt Lean Production Systems, an idea conveived by Toyota for its car-making, to transform their plants to efficient ones, for survival in the globalisation era, Sundaram Clayton Limited Brakes Division President C N Prasad said today.
''Globalisation has changed the way manufacturing is done. Lean manufacturing, a tool to achieve zero-waste manufacturing, could alone help retain customers in a competitive environment'', he said, delivering the keynote address at the Confederation of India's ''Man Exe-05'', a leadership series on manufacturing excellence.
Using Information Technology in manufacturing and adopting ''Six Sigma'', a rigorous, focused and highly effective implementation of proven quality principles and techniques, were necessary to ensure that performance improved, he said, stressing the need for new product development, daily review as against monthly or quarterly reviews and team culture for achieving results.
Giving a presentation on Small and Medium Enterprise clusters - the Ambattur experience, Mr K P Gopal of Stuser Tools Chennai said the cluster approach helped lower costs, facilitated peer pressure and benchmarking, group learning and mutual sharing from sucessess and failures.
The lessons from the cluster project showed that manufacturing excellence did not depend on the size of the company and was not at all expensive. The age of a company was not a restricting factor, Mr Gopal added.
