Adversities, challenges, issues, and problems are part and parcel of every manufacturing and business industry. Sometimes they could be foreseen. But many a time, an avalanche of obstacles may strike you unexpectedly.
And the kind of resilience shown by the Indian industry inc. in the face of the pandemic; the thunderstorm of turbulent times is praiseworthy. Of course, in these efforts, many factors and many public and private sector entities aided them—entities like Manufacturing and Business Excellence Consultancy or MABEC in short.
MABEC, as a management consulting firm, was established back in 2011. Thus, even before the pandemic struck, they had already been consulting industry stalwarts like Aditya Birla Group of Companies, JSW Steel, Emami Group of Companies, Bajaj Consumer care, Indian Oil Company, Realxo, RAK Ceramics(UAE), Hindalco, Ultratech Cement, Shadeed Steel(Oman) etc., amongst the many.
MABEC could do this because of the consummate and visionary leadership of Rajendra S Potdar, the Founder and CEO. Rajendra states, “We offer unique people engagement excellence model to help clients simplify their business and manufacturing processes to enable the achievement of business objectives, pandemic or no pandemic.”
With a rich experience in manufacturing and business consulting, MABEC has established itself as a firm that helps clients facilitate growth and helps them for sustenance.
MABEC is currently involved in providing management consultancy to a large number of private as well as public sector companies distributed across various sectors like steel, aluminium, cement, engineering, chemicals, oil and gas, petroleum, pharma, cosmetics, food, FMCG, footwear and education sectors in India and abroad.
Harshal Pradhan, Director adds, “Our main offerings under the broader umbrella of manufacturing and business excellence are identifying operational losses and wastages and eliminating them through lean management, TPM/TQM, workplace management, safety excellence, health assessments, and competency enhancement training solutions.”
MABEC is empanelled by the Quality Council of India and National Productivity Council under MSME’s lean competitive scheme by Govt of India.
The Team of Champions
MABEC comprises highly qualified and experienced technocrats with professional qualifications in different areas of engineering and technology, such as production, mechanical, electrical, electronic, etc. and long practical experience in manufacturing and business excellence.
Many consultants have been trained at various Japanese Institutions such as the Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance JIPM, JUSE (Union of Japanese Scientist and Engineers), and AOTS. The team members have long professional and industrial experience in lean management, TPM, workplace management, and Kaizen.
They combine dynamism, wisdom, and long practical experience in senior positions. D P Chattopadhyay, Director(TPM) shares, “Our highly qualified and trained consultants have a track record of converting their strong conceptual understanding into action for their associated organisations. We have Mr Samarendra Nath Roy, Director(Consulting), Mr Sapan Bardhan, Director(OD), Mr Harshal Pradhan, Director(Manufacturing Excellence), and Mr Nityanand Parulekar, Director(ZED) in our team of champions.”
The Pursuit of Excellence
S N Roy, Director(Consulting) says, “We have spent a significant part of our professional life as engineers and managers. We faced huge problems more or less every day in our daily work management. We also realised that almost everyone in the organisation faced similar difficulties daily.
Our daily problems triggered us to do things in a better way than we were already doing.”
Once Martin Luther King said, “If I can’t do great things, I can do small things in a great way.” Abraham Lincoln used to say, “I do the very best I know-how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.”
Both above quotes talk about the consistency of doing good work. Rajendra states, “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence then is not an act but a habit.” He simply means that doing a routine task consistently well is what MABEC excels at.
In Rajendra’s words, “We started our pursuit of excellence.” There was a severe need to deep dive into the organisation to understand the current way of doing things to guide people in doing daily work management effectively with the help of various excellence initiatives.
He continues, “Slowly, our consistent way of doing good things became our passion. Hence, we ventured into the field of business and manufacturing excellence consultancy and training.”
Conquering the Challenges
Since all manufacturing and business excellence initiatives required daily dedicated time from front line associates during their working hours, there were many challenges initially in convincing senior management to release people daily to ensure sustenance of the implementation gains.
Initially, all excellence initiatives started with tremendous momentum in big companies, but later sustenance issues cropped up. Rajendra explains, “So we had to struggle a lot initially to change the mindset of senior and middle management. But eventually, we were able to do that.”
According to Sapan Bardhan, Director(OD), the challenges of today are very different. For example, more and more workforces in large companies are becoming contractual. He defines the problem, and its solution, “Tremendous people are churning in industries nowadays, and when we took massive efforts on competency building of individuals, there used to be a sudden change of people, resulting in we having to initiate re-training of the new joiners. But now, we have our own developed strategies to overcome this challenge.”
A Guiding Light of Brilliance
Talking about the USPs of MABEC, Rajendra says, “We customise business solutions for our clients. We take a holistic approach to our client’s business.
Our past results speak for themselves. We go deep into the mechanics of our client’s business, and team members’ rich ground-level experience helps.
We handhold people at every level in the organisation. We inspire them to seek excellence with our guided path.
That is our USP. This makes MABEC stand out as the most strategic consultancy for businesses. Some of our clients have achieved the following significant tangible benefits:
- Quality Defects PPM – 50% reduction
- Space reclaimed for productive work – 10 to 15%
- Increase in inventory turnover – 10 to 20%
- Reduction in manufacturing lead time – 5 to 30%
- Improvement in OEE – 10 to 25%
- Thousands of Kaizens are generated as a routine practice.
- Increase in productivity by 8-20%.
- Millions of savings
- Establishing good management systems/practices involving the total workforce and thus creating an environment of safety, high morale & quality consciousness.”
On successful completion of two lean clusters successfully, the Quality Council of India and MSME DI, Govt of India officials placed MABEC among the top five clusters of Maharashtra.
USP of this success was MABEC’s unique approach to people development and employee engagement in all the organisation. That’s why MABEC is successful in consulting many large and MSME organisations.
MABEC received the ‘Best Lean Manufacturing Consultant Brand of the Year’ award in recognition of outstanding accomplishment in lean consulting at #TIME2LEAP AWARDS- MSME EDITION 2020-21.
Defeating the Pandemic
Speaking about the impact of COVID-19 on MABEC, Rajendra says, “In fact, we are fortunate enough that we could help our clients even during the severe phases of the pandemic to create a strategy for adapting to the new normal.
We visualised the possible impact on the industry, designed an SOP for the new normal, circulated it across the sectors in April’2020, and conducted a series of virtual workshops for the first six months.”
As far as the efforts taken by MABEC during the pandemic to sustain its operations were tremendous. Rajendra says that supply chains were disrupted at the clients’ end during the pandemic. The workforce had migrated back to their hometowns.
“So, they needed us even more badly to help them run the daily management smoothly. So, our operations were running. During restriction phases, we could facilitate the client companies virtually. We led our clients to adjust quickly to the new normal,” says Nityanand Parulekar, Director(ZED) in a satisfying tone.
Consultant’s Wisdom
As an established industry leader, Rajendra’s first advice to the budding entrepreneurs and enthusiasts aspiring to venture into the business consultancy industry is ~ to not venture into business consultancy unless and until you have acquired sufficient domain expertise in the area in which you wish to start consulting business.
Apart from gaining domain expertise, it is also required to achieve business maturity, especially for dealing with senior management.
Business consultancy requires 24×7 passion, work ethics, dedication, and commitment. Therefore, Rajendra suggests that you venture into this area only if you are ready for this.
Transforming the Tomorrow
Rajendra divulges about MABECs future mission: ” We will be expanding our base in the competency enhancement areas. These are the much-needed vitamins for the industry to remain healthy, fit and fine. We have already created a Competency Excellence Model ‘Manthan’.”
Finally, Rajendra concludes, “We are on a strong foundation in this area apart from our core offerings of lean management, organisational health assessments, safety excellence, manufacturing, and business excellence initiatives in a TPM/TQM way as per the organisation’s need. We help transform people, and people transform their processes and organisation.”
