Competitiveness Thru' a Competence Protocol

Enabling emergence of India as a hub for castings-for-the-global-market is a dictum for our foundry industry to achieve due competitiveness. Three essentialities for ensuring success are: raw materials, marketing, and processes. Indian industry perhaps cannot assault at competition by merely controlling the first two; but has to secure a foothold at the core i.e. the processes. It signifies premeditated business strength of technology, maturity in process controls, and thereby affecting savings or offsetting losses in production. It must also address the indirect impacts of production programme, especially the environmental impact, because that is an area which will tend ti commit itself under pressure following each success in production. What is the level of this competitive state of competence is to be dynamically determined and continually improved upon by the organization. With a view to improve upon the competence, a few organizations were subjected to a Competence Protocol. This paper discusses the result of those competitiveness impetuses and the direct and indirect gains accruing therefrom (from six large organizations/units). The gains ranged from cost cutting, improvement over operational control leading to better quality and environmental standards, lowering of unit's breakdown records, implicit improvement of safety standards and liberation of resources to their credit of having sustained recession with no bruises