GETTING SMARTER
ON A HOT SUMMER DAY in 2014, Sunil Mathur had a bit of a problem on his hands. His business development team told him competition was taking away market share. It’s not as if their quality was better. “They are just producing more variants than us,” was the response. As MD and CEO of Siemens Limited, this was not a great situation to be in. Mathur, an old company hand, decided to get to the bottom of it. The demand was for more production lines for which there would be significant capex. The chartered accountant in Mathur came to the fore and when queries related to return on investment came up, it was obvious that the numbers did not add up. Nevertheless, the issue needed to be addressed.
“That’s when we decided to drink our own champagne,” says Mathur with a laugh. What stared him in the face was a 50-year-old factory in Kalwa, an industrial location outside Mumbai, manufacturing circuit breakers (a device that automatically stops the flow of current in an electric circuit) using serial production (referring to large quantities that are made in the same way). In terms of actual numbers, there were 77 variants of the product across three production lines. “We decided to apply smart manufacturing to see if it works well,” recalls Mathur. In July 2017, the new-look factory was inaugurated and as the results trickled in,
