Govt. incentives catalyst for MSME tech advancements

June 17, 2019 4:19 pm

Creation and promotion of indigenous technology is imperative to make India a technological marvel, says Tarun Mishra, Founder & CEO, Covacsis Technologies Pvt. Ltd, in an interaction with OEM Update.

Huge possibilities for Indian manufacturing sector
‘Make in India’ slogan itself denotes that Indian manufacturing industry has a huge possibility of growth left in front of it. Government’s various initiatives of making India a global hub in hardware and mobile technology is appreciable. Some has been achieved, but a lot is yet to be achieved.

Government is required to set up the blueprint for individual industries. Textile and pharmaceutical industries are losing its shine in global arena against fast emerging Bangladesh and other smaller economies. Healthy narratives, right sentiments, and appropriate industrial policy will be required to realise the real value.

Supporting policy to keep Indian manufacturing competitive is extremely important, as the cost advantage that India had few decades ago is narrowing rapidly. Fundamental of industries such as efficient supply chain, stable demand trend locally as well as globally, and availability of right skill set is imperative for Make in India to succeed in the longer run.

Need a better ecosystem of MSMEs
MSMEs are usually at the end of value chain. Any change in industry reaches last to MSME as majority them are heavily dependent on large manufacturing companies.

Therefore, it is imperative that large players in a value chain adopt the technology fully and then support smaller players in their industry for sustainable advantage. We need to build an enabling ecosystem where responsibility of upgradation of MSME must be on the shoulder of larger player. Government’s support and incentive schemes will become catalyst in that direction. I personally don’t see a challenge, however, I surely would like Indian manufacturers to adopt digital technology much faster than they are doing.

Tips to make India a technological marvel
I have some advice to make if India wants to turn into a genius technological marvel.

Creation and promotion of indigenous technology is imperative. Government must setup more than $2 billion to invest in Indian product/technology companies. While foreign investment are welcome, they have limited agenda for Indian ecosystem.

Industry must be incentivised for adopting digital technology to improve their efficiencies and hence increase the supply chain efficiency of India. A separate stock exchange for early stage companies must be put in function to raise smaller capital through public offer. Lot of impetus on futuristic technology and research must be mandated on educational institutes to keep India skill ready.

Technology upgradation
An upgradation can never cause disruption in negative way, degradation in technologies does. Not upgrading the factories in a timely manner will kill the organisation and have serious negative impact its on employees and society. Upgrading in timely manner keeps organisation healthy and sustainable. Also, upgradation to smart factory will upgrade the skill of large number of people and push them up the skill curve and value curve to generate more value for themselves as well as the organisation and society.

Technology upgrade will also make the world more efficient, cleaner, greener and sustainable.

Switching to smart factory
It is obvious that while large enterprise have unimaginable possibility of benefiting from smart factory technology, it is equally obvious that small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) can draw great financial benefits through such technology.

Most of the SMBs are still heavily dependent on human skill at the manufacturing floor. Dependency on operators and some experts leads to inconsistencies and intuitive way of managing operation. Smart factory technologies help convert human skill into data driven practice to upgrade the skill of all operators and bringing them close to the expert one.

This also translates into driving consistency in quality output leading to higher profitability per unit of production. It’s almost impossible to adopt best operation management and production management practices as per GMP, TQM, TPM etc. A digital expert system have built in capability to analyse and suggest operation team keeping world class practices in its logic. That makes adoption of best practices simpler and extremely cost effective for SMBs.

In simple terms, improving efficiency is one big area for manufacturing. Covacsis Technologies have helped more than 100 factories to become more efficient without spending on machineries and consultants. One can gain efficiency by increasing the productivity, reducing waste, and reducing the conversion cost.

Cloud solutions for machine tool industry
Cloud technology offers significant cost advantage to run solutions related to smart factory. Cloud has compelling proposition until new generation high-compute-low-cost servers come to play to match cloud cost.

Cloud also offers right infrastructure to incubate artificial intelligence based technology to help manufacturing graduate to next level of decision making.

Connected manufacturing for machine tools industry is essential in future. Collaborative operation on the shop floor across different machines will not only increase productivity but will also help innovation in process and better product design.

Lot of impetus on futuristic technology and research must be mandated on educational institutes to keep India skill ready
Tarun Mishra, Founder & CEO, Covacsis Technologies Pvt Ltd