The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has led many companies in India and World to ask their employees to work from home. Some IT companies are coping up with the situation by providing laptops and desktops to their employees. However, have you wondered how the manufacturing industry will cope with the situation? With the world locking inside their houses we looked for the options open to the people working in the sector.
When we asked this question to people working in the industry, many had the same answer that working from home is not a choice for the industry. Pradeep Ghumare who is director of IND-TECH Consultants, who provides consulting service for the business and partnership with German and Japanese companies, said, “that if the situation worsens then the industry will face a lockdown but that will be for a few days. “More than this lockdown”, he said, “the problem for Indian manufacturing is the economic situation of the nations because of demonetization, huge NPAs and this outbreak is adding to it.”
For the manufacturing sector, it is practically not possible to work from home but if we take proper care in the factories and maintain basic sanitation it will help to combat COVID-19
Pradeep Ghumare
Director, IND-TECH Consultants
Some people came up with solutions like Daily monitoring of the temperature at the entry and exit gates, for all the employees, disinfecting the components after handling in the assembly line and use of hand sanitizers at all entry/exit points and work tables.
R. Parthiban of JPJ Technologies Pvt Ltd from Chennai said that the moving of tooling setups to another location inside the factory campus to increase the distance between operators can help. He later added that nowadays single piece flow production or lean 6 Sigma is practiced in almost all industries; since all market is dull now, earlier batch production on alternate days can be tried again.
For the president of Pimpri Chinchwad Chamber of Industries, Commerce, Services, and Agriculture, Adv. Appasaheb Shinde working for home is a non-issue as he believes that there is already no work in the industry due to disruption of the supply chain from China and transition to BS-VI. He said that manufacturing and especially automotive sector work has come down by 50%; even SMEs, MSMEs with auto majors are in trouble. He urged the government to take the step for saving the sector and said, ”there no need for work from home facility in the manufacturing sector as there will be no work at all in an if the situation on supply chain and demand front remains the same.”
While answering our tricky question Manu Sharma President, Kider India Pvt Ltd said, “It is a really tough decision for the manufacturing sector and I do not think they can ask their employees to work from home because even highly automated systems will require people to operate it.”
For now, the industry people can at most reduce the number of people working in the company at the same time to reduce the crowd
Manu Sharma
President, Kider India
Ajit Patil who is Managing Director of Ewellix which is a leading supplier of linear motion components and solutions said, “people working in supporting job roles like sales and HR and purchase the department can be asked to work from home and it will reduce the number of people working in the company but core manufacturing people will have to go to work in the industries.”
While talking about the issue P.S. Satish who is a corporate trainer, mentor, and consultant, at Saraswati Industrial services in Bengaluru, said that the manufacturing cannot really accept work from home and in addition to that the sector is not prepared for the work from home thing.
The key prerequisite for work from home is that processes and IT usage in the company should be well established and the manufacturing sector is not prepared for that
P S Satish
Consultant, Saraswati Industrial services
Sayli More who works in the supply chain department at Discom international based in Chesterfield Township said that although few people from the design and supply chain department can do their work from home it decreases the efficiency as they have to face technical issues with servers they are working on. She added that for other departments like manufacturing, maintenance, production it is not possible to work from home. While talking about the health hazards Sayli said that thus COVID-19 remains a threat to people on the shop floor because components and parts are handled manually at times in the assembly line and it can spread the infection if proper care is not taken.
