The term “Productivity“ in the industry, is broadly understood as a combination of Production, Capacity Utilization, Quality & Service of the final product. It is measured by certain indices and that too, in terms of Machine & Labour Productivity. In order to achieve the quality final product or service, one must have the right blend of all 5 resources like Men, Machine, Material, Money & Management. However, the core term remains the TIME.
The real game is the TIME MANAGEMENT in relation to any individual or the industry as a whole. It has been observed that with the growth of any organization; from small to medium to large & finally a giant scale control & monitoring of productivity becomes complex; and is beyond index, data, graphs, charts when it happens to be a matter of nerves. It becomes more & more complicated with the size of employment from say, more than 10,000 workers, operating 24 hrs x 7 days. The element of Productivity has shown the light of 1 st to 3 rd industrial revolution & will further do so in the forthcoming 4th industrial revolution. Also, the format of productivity has kept changing from the 1 st to the 4th phase of the industrial revolution.
The author has a wide experience of the industry worldwide, from India to Tanzania, Thailand, Nigeria & Ethiopia. The entire work & organizational culture have a lot of bearing on the respective level of productivity. It also depends upon the quality of preventive machine maintenance.
The term has tremendous significance in a broad spectrum of economic sectors such as; manufacturing, farming & services. However, the author has chosen to cite examples in all sectors, but focused on the importance of productivity in the manufacturing sector, in particular. The data of higher quantum of milk, food grain & cotton in the farm sector is different from the higher productivity of milk/cattle, food grain & cotton/hectare.
Historically, the human being is constantly chasing revolutions one after another and approached to the present day Revolution – Industry 4.0. In the process, human being as an individual and the organizations as a whole transformed to a great extent translating into comforts, lifestyle; and also meeting the ever-increasing global demands in the form of quantity, quality, and services for varieties of products.
The attempt has been made to decode the term productivity in relation to supporting terms like Efficiency, Machine Interference, Machine & Labour productivity, Capacity utilization, Productivity Index and Multi-Factor Productivity (MFP).
The methods of production have been described. ASSEMBLY LINE system of production along with the ROBOTS have been highlighted as the finest gifts of industrial revolutions 2 & 3. It has certainly revolutionized the specific industry & the units of the industry but resulted in substantial labor rationalization. Hence, the suggestion is the selective application of ROBOTS in the industry.
Further, the presentation has attempted to express the importance of individual productivity and finally, its conversion into the organizational & national productivity and thus GDP. Simply one may describe it as the matter of TIME MANAGEMENT. Also, it specially addresses the wider issues of the lifecycle and how the understanding can help all in monitoring the lifestyle with the angles of education, health & experience.
However, the most important part of this book is to showcase the practical handling of issues related to labor productivity in the manufacturing industry, which is very critical and stressful with the growing size of the company. The case studies reproduced here provide only a glimpse of experiences which results in industrial turnaround and finally the TRANSFORMATION. While going through the exercise, the person managing as the Company’s head – General Manager, President or CEO need to exhibit the strength of the nerves handling the task tactfully interacting the group of workers, staff and the complete management, external agencies as a part of larger exercise of MAN MANAGEMENT & TEAM MANAGEMENT for completing the mission successfully. It is to highlight that, such herculean task accomplishments bring about the “RECHARGING” and major TRANSFORMATION in the organization through proper tools of COMMUNICATION. That is the journey, from productivity to profitability and transformation.
The author would desire to collaborate with experts from diverse industries and to join with their experience in future editions.
