Participating as the Chief Guest at the inaugural session of Productivity Week celebrations at BHEL, Ramachandrapuaram, Hyderabad Metro Rail Ltd MD NVS Reddy addressed the BHEL engineers and employees on the topic of “Lean Management for Productivity Enhancement’’.
Lauding BHEL’s contribution as a successful public sector undertaking to Indian economy, he advised BHEL employees to further improve their productivity by adopting more effective management practices like ‘Lean Management’. NVS Reddy indicated during the lecture that the fast growing world trade in consumer goods provides an excellent export opportunity of 8 trillion dollars (Rs.496 lakh crore) for the low cost manufacturing countries and that China is cornering a major part of this. He emphasized that India should improve it’s manufacturing competitiveness to capture a sizeable share in it. He pointed out that by adopting global best practices in productivity, the Indian manufacturing sector can improve its performance, create 6 to 9 crore additional jobs and contribute to 25% of the GDP.
Invoking India’s success story in the service sector IT, ITES industry, Reddy stated that similar success can be achieved by the manufacturing industries by adopting better work culture and management practices. He cited the example of how Japanese automotive industry successfully contributed to the revival of Japanese economy after the Second World War by adoption of Lean Management practices.
Dwelling on Lean Management practices, Reddy explained that Lean Management primarily concentrates on elimination of wastages; optimal utilisation of resources; and improvement of production processes to add value to the final product. In Lean Management, the emphasis is on quality, value addition and better customer satisfaction, he explained.
Reddy highlighted the lean management and lean construction practices being followed in the Hyderabad Metro Rail project like optimal engineering solutions, better construction methods, conversion of 85% of the Metro works into “pre-casting” mode, etc. Responding to the challenge of managing traffic in congested roads during Metro construction, lean management practices have been adopted to minimise inconvenience to road users. The design of Hyderabad Metro stations as “cantilever stations” is an engineering marvel and a fine example of lean construction, he averred. He further mentioned that successful completion of Hyderabad Metro Rail project will add value to Hyderabad city.
Adoption of lean management and lean construction practices; design innovations and conversion of project from a simple transportation engineering project to a multipurpose socio-economic project started winning coveted global awards for the Hyderabad Metro Rail project including “The Best Engineering Project of the Year-2013” award at New York; and RoSPA (Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents) Gold Award for ‘Construction Safety & Occupational Health’ at Glasgow, UK., he added.
BHEL Executive Directors N Ravi Chander and M.K.Sharma and other senior BHEL engineers and managers have participated in the programme. (INN)