Event

Frost & Sullivan Hosted Manufacturing Summit 2007

Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, held the ‘Manufacturing Summit 2007’ at Hyatt Regency, Mumbai

Covering topics like Enterprise Resource Planning, Integrating IT to leverage manufacturing systems control, Supply Chain Management, Challenges towards Implementing MES amongst others, this summit provided an ideal platform for knowledge exchange and business networking. These topics covered a wide range of areas that continue to pose a challenge and constraint to achieving higher degrees of manufacturing excellence.

The participants had an opportunity to learn about proven practices and hear industry experts speak on what factors contribute towards the successful deployment of these practices. Besides, the forum was designed to assist companies overcome their implementation constraints and thereby improve processes.

Speaking about the roadmap ahead for manufacturing, Anand Rangachary, Managing Director, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia and Middle East, said, “It’s a known fact that India’s next era of growth will be fuelled by manufacturing. To make this a reality, a series of favorable policy decisions, followed by full implementation are required. We not only need to ensure that FDI inflows into manufacturing happen, but also need to simultaneously address our regulatory and infrastructural challenges.”

Welcome address by Raghavendra Rao, Director - Manufacturing Process Consulting Group, Frost & Sullivan – South Asia & Middle East for the Manufacturing Summit 2007

Anand Rangachary, MD, Frost & Sullivan – South Asia & Middle East addressing the audience at the India Manufacturing Excellence Awards 2007

The summit also gave a platform to the manufacturing heads to share their best practices with others to learn and grow. The participants had an opportunity to benchmark their practices with these world class companies, identify the areas of improvement and examine some of the issues that might be blocking progress and delivery of sustained improvement.

This was illustrated by a number of real life case studies and presentations from the organizations that have managed to change what they do and are achieving some remarkable results as a consequence.

In one of the presentations, Anantha Sayana, Head – Corporate IT, L&T Infotech, talked about dimensions in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). He said, “For most of the manufacturing companies, ERP is a core of IT support of the organization, supporting routine transaction processing. And in large corporations, ERP turns out to be a repository of finally processed information. The main objectives of an enterprise are achieved through the performance of business process and usage.

Frost & Sullivan, at the eve of the summit on 7th December, also hosted India Manufacturing Excellence Awards (IMEA) 2007 that aimed to recognize and applaud efforts of Indian manufacturing companies towards achieving excellent-to-world class manufacturing status.

The awards ceremony saw both large and emerging enterprises being presented ‘Platinum’ and ‘Gold’ awards across sectors such as Automotive, Automotive Ancillaries, Engineering, Chemicals, Healthcare, Metals and Process.

Highlighting the key findings from IMEA, Raghavendra Rao, Director - Manufacturing and Process Consulting Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia and Middle East, said, “At a broad level, the findings have been promising. Almost 70% of companies assessed (those that had applied and been subsequently short-listed) recorded good progress in their journey towards leanness. Another 24% had gone beyond and established reliable systems. At the other end, we had 7% facilities that had made no significant move towards manufacturing excellence.”