CII plans to start 100 quality training clusters for SMEs

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is planning to start 100 quality training clusters that will train personnel from the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and is targeting to set up at least 30 of these clusters in the south.

"We have tied up with Small Industries Development Bank of India (Sidbi) to offer loans to these companies to enroll for the two-year programme. These training programmes represent terrific opportunities for the SMEs in the manufacturing sector enabling them to global level quality training," said Surinder Kapur, chairman-CII national committee on quality and chairman and managing director, Sono Koyo Steering Systems (Sono Koyo) in his keynote address at OPTIMA 2004 recently. The conference, organised by CII, focused on 'operations management'.

A formal meeting to formulate the actual implementation programme would be organised in Chennai on January 4, 2005. Each of these clusters will have 10-12 SMEs as its members and will aim to increase the level of quality among these companies.

Product development is the key to cost competitiveness and product design gains importance as 80 per cent of the cost is fixed at the design stage. Kapur stated that IT tools will be coupled with engineering skills in Sono Koyo's continued drive to sustain excellence after the company won the Deming Prize Award.

"In one to five years time all our production managers will sit in a production control room and monitor the shop floor virtually. Clients will also be able to monitor at what product development stage is their design at virtually on the internet," added Kapur.

The other speakers at the conference included MS Shantharam, chief manufacturing officer of Titan Industries; Nallan C Suresh, director, centre for global supply chain management-University of Buffalo, USA; and, D Ravi, regional business head (enterprise solutions) of ICICI Infotech.