The plant is the ultimate frontier in the manufacturing business. And it is the person in charge of the plant, who along with his team plays a vital role in ensuring that the facility keeps delivering as per the organisational goals and strategies.

The success or failure in achieving this goal is primarily determined by how the plant and its top boss take on the challenges thrown at them. Joydip Ghosh, Vice President - Filters Business & HK Operations, Disa (The Norican Group), tells The Machinist how Disa India's Hosakote facility has not only overcome the challenges but also has doubled its output in the past four years (with 50 percent YOY growth in 2013) under his leadership.

So what have been these challenges and how has Ghosh tackled them? He identifies bringing in visibility of goals, bottlenecks and process performance indices as the first key issue. And his tool in this fight has been communication. "We are never shy of spending more energy on communication of various important information, which is relevant to the shop floor," Ghosh says.

This starts with a monthly communication meeting, where entire company performance, market conditions, other highlights and so on, are presented. This is also an Open Forum for answering questions on any subject by anybody. This is followed by project specific communication. All important parameters like quality, safety, delivery, customer complaints, cost and so on are constantly reviewed and communicated to the team. "Many a times, excellent suggestions come up from the grass root level of the organisation, resulting in very good savings or solution of problems," Ghosh says.