Bridge of Manufacturing Excellence
SKF has developed the Bridge of Manufacturing Excellence, a global programme that encourages the sharing of manufacturing knowledge and expertise around the world. And the Pune factory operates on this ‘Bridge'. "This initiative touches every area of operations and involves every employee in the process of quality assurance and continual improvement.
"Among other things, the programme includes the standardisation of work activities and process to SKF best practices to assure stability and repeatability," informs Selig. It takes care of the ongoing training of employees to maintain channel quality and assures that new employees acquire knowledge of SKF standards and procedures. It leads to the empowerment of employees and teams for personal involvement in quality control and improvement.
The ‘Bridge' ensures the implementation of Six Sigma continuous improvement tools to create new and better manufacturing standards and procedures. It follows a demand-driven workflow to help assure that the Company makes the products required by its customers.
The SKF Bridge of Manufacturing Excellence programme involves every employee in the process of quality assurance and continual improvement. This bridge structure of business excellence illustrates SKF's processes as a link. "Working together with our suppliers and customers helps SKF in creating tangible customer value by optimising the manufacturing flow, improving the efficiency and quality, shortening the delivery time and thus serving customers better," says Selig.
Kushal - The training centre
One of the highlights of the Pune factory is an excellent training centre called Kushal (which means ‘skilled' in most Indian languages). Located within the factory premises, Kushal offers training programmes in safety, basic bearing knowledge, quality and measurement systems, lubrication basics, grinding processes, machine operations, resetting, PLC training, TPM and business excellence.
The SKF Group strives on its multi-skilling approach for its employees and Kushal plays a key role in furthering this. At a time, 35 people can be trained at this centre. Each employee has to undergo a mandatory training course of four man-days at Kushal, which aligns them to the business goals.
Started about three years ago, Kushal has already trained more 2,000 people so far. The success of this training center has now motivated other Group companies to replicate this model at their respective factories.
Thus, by blending technology with training, knowledge with experience and quality with innovation the SKF Pune factory is setting new standards in terms of delivery, performance and fulfilling customer expectations, says Selig.
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