Improve planning

In becoming a partner of choice for many electrical manufacturing brands, Karnataka Engineering faced many data management challenges. Earlier, the company used traditional methods of data management and risked instances of data losses. In the absence of a robust data management system, the company’s personnel stored important design data on external hard drives and individual computers, resulting in a significant amount of important project data being stored in an unstructured manner at insecure locations and devices

CII and KPMG's first annual survey of Industry 4.0 digital readiness across ten Indian manufacturing sectors, benchmarked against Germany, Japan, South Korea, China, the US, the UK and Singapore. The report exposes wide disparities — large firms score 3.4/5 while MSMEs trail at 2.4 — and although 85% of senior leaders prioritise digitalisation, only 30% of organisations have successfully scaled their initiatives.

Setco had a standard and elaborate new product development methodology at its India and U.K. manufacturing facilities to ensure minimum errors. The Setco team took clutch manufacturing requirements from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and carried out an in-depth feasibility study. The team then built a product prototype and validated it in-house to assure fulfillment of OEM requirements. The team then submitted the prototype to the OEM for vehicle-level checks and after validation, submitted the pilot sample, after which product delivery began. In this entire process, Setco’s multiple in-house shops such as tooling, heat treatment, machine, press/stamping, and assembly played a crucial role in manufacturing world-class products and hence required close collaboration. Initially, the Setco team transferred design data between its India and U.K. offices and their various shops through the file transfer protocol (FTP) and individual email communication. This mode meant that the communication was completely one-to-one and, due to its manual nature, posed security risks and delays. In the absence of a secure system of sharing design data with various project stakeholders, the Setco team faced challenges in effective and timely in-house collaboration. Also, this method made the product validation process with OEM customers difficult and time-consuming and kept many loopholes that gave rise to errors. The direct fallout of collaboration through manual data sharing among various product development teams was that the company’s new product development initiatives took a direct hit in terms of timelines. To enable real-time design data collaboration between the U.K. and India teams (including the in-house shop personnel), ensure drawing digitalization, security, and scalability, and augment new product development, the Setco team decided to use Teamcenter® software from Siemens PLM Software. Setco chose Teamcenter because their prestigious OEM customers were already using the system and highly recommended it. The Setco management team decided to get the same Teamcenter setup that they witnessed at one of their OEM customer’s premises.

Published for CII's 'Smart Factory for Chemicals & Petrochemicals Industry' seminar (Dec 2023) with McKinsey as knowledge partner, this report outlines how digital and analytics (DnA) transformation can unlock competitive advantage for Indian chemical companies — particularly MSMEs — at a time when the sector is projected to grow 11–12% annually through 2027 and triple its global market share by 2040.

The huge customer base of Hero Motocorp presents many opportunities for spare parts business in India. To cater the varying customer demand, the supply chain must be responsive and information flow to Vendors and dealers is very crucial. Following are the major fields of opportunities

Published by the CII Smart Manufacturing Council, this compendium presents eight in-depth case studies from Indian and global companies — including Ace Micromatic Group, B&R India, Bosch India, IBM India, Rockwell Automation India and Siemens India — demonstrating real-world deployments of smart manufacturing technologies and the resulting benefits.