Need to form sectoral consensus on what needs to change for manufacturing to reclaim its rightful place in the growth story…
Promising to be one of its own kind seminar, the CII-Planning Commission Joint Seminar on “Manufacturing – Strategy for Growth: Workforce Engagement and Skills Imperative” witnessed a great start with industry experts narrating shopfloor experiences and sharing expert advice on the way forward for bringing back the fun historically associated with manufacturing. The seminar was held at New Delhi, on 14th March, 2013, and Mr. Arun Maira, Member, Planning Commission, was the Chief Guest of the event. The need to form sectoral consensus on the changes required for manufacturing to reclaim its rightful place in the economy and the role of associations in bringing such consensus emerged as the prevailing thought.
Mr. K. Venkataramanan, Chairman, CII Manufacturing Council & CEO and MD Larsen & Toubro opened the inaugural session. He highlighted the significance of integration of pre-manufacturing and post-manufacturing productivity and referred to recognition of people, development of tools to engage with them and leading people by example as essential to success of enterprises. These recommendations also find support in the CII-BCG report on “People’s productivity: Key to Manufacturing Competitiveness” that suggests change in management attitude towards people productivity levers – right talent, adequate training and skilling, and maximum employment engagement.
Talking about workforce engagement, Mr. Arun Maira dwelt on the “need to consider people as whole human beings and not just hands.” He supported his statement by alluding to examples from Japan and other countries. Mr. Maira referred to the need to develop a system of interaction with the people as extremely important – as important as skill. During his talk, Mr. Maira laid great emphasis on the industry’s need to form consensus for the change that they wanted for manufacturing to return to where it truly belonged. He also emphasized on the need to adhere to the fundamental principles of organisations while dealing with the workforce. In doing so, Mr Maira alluded to the success story of Japanese automobile players, who combated high exchange rates in the early 1980’s designed to fail them, by retaining their employees and productively engaging with them instead of letting go of them during the worst of times – they actually increased production by 5-10% during the period! Mr. Maira was sharing the encouraging findings of Prof. Takahiro Fujimoto, Executive Director, Manufacturing Management Research Centre, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo, Japan, around this subject. Mr. Maira advised against treating people as “just hands”. This may indeed be the reason for low preference (only 15%) of students to opt for for manufacturing as indicated by the CII-BCG report.
Dr. Surinder Kapoor, Chairman, CII IR Committee & Chairman, Sona Koyo Steering System Ltd., while dwelling on the factors curbing India’s manufacturing productivity in his inaugural address, brought a different perspective by refusing to accept change in labour laws as the only panacea for the revival of the manufacturing productivity. Dr. Kapoor said that ‘the industry would first need to agree on what exactly needed to change about these laws’. He also spoke at length about the benefits of evolving a methodology of engaging with the workers on their terrain employing tools like quality management.
With interesting themes discussed during the day – Making Manufacturing Fun; Developing World-Class Productivity by Skill Development and Training; and, Working as Partners: Aligning Aspirations of the employees across the organization - the event seemed definitely prepared to be an exercise in introspection and brainstorming for making manufacturing what it is meant to be – Fun!