Business/Organization: Client is having multiple plants in the industrial areas in Maharashtra and Gurgaon. Client manufactures steel tubes for automotive fuel lines and engine assembly. Client supply parts to Maruti Suzuki and Honda cars India.

Business Challenge: One of the major issues manufacturing industry is facing is retention of employees and new talent acquisition. Right quality of candidates with good mix of skills, education and experience are not available to manufacturing industry. This is because manufacturing units are typically more than 50 Kms away from the city center. Right quality of candidates are reluctant to travel 100 kms everyday for work. Civic facilities like school, hospital and good quality of life available only around city centers. On the other hand, manufacturing units are away from city center due to land availability and requirement of various government compliance. These units are located near economically backward areas and are sanctioned as “special economic zones” by state and provincial governments. In such area local candidates available do not possess high tech skills required by today’s industry.Due to lack of talent, there wereaccounting mistakes, false reporting, wrong financial decisions which ultimately results in the profitability and downfall. Cloud computing can be effectively utilized to solve this issue. One of such was resolved by our team for a Pune based manufacturer.

Our client did not have right quality of people to operate ERP system. Accounts and finance related ERP application had many input error that could not be resolved even after repeated training of employees. Employee retention was also difficult due to many factories opening up in the same area. There there was a pull for the trained manpower. As a corrective action our team recruited manpower from the city. But their retention became difficult due to long travel times i.e. 3 hours every day + 9 work hours. As a result many tax related irregularities were noticed in ERP by the chartered accountants at end of financial year.

Consulting solution provided by Odyssey Consulting: ERP system was integrated with cloud computing. All the database for purchase, projects, accounts and finance was relocated to the cloud based system from a local server based system. A corporate office was set up in a low cost co-working space in the city center. Desks of directors, finance head, accounts head and CEO’s were relocated to the city-based office. Plant performance monitoring, machine OEE data monitoring was also shifted to cloud based application through Industry 4.0/ IoT implementation. This enabled monitoring of all Plant KPIs through a central corporate office from in the city. Interviews were scheduled for chief accounts and fiance person and good quality candidates were selected with reasonable pay.

This system has been in place for last 2 years and it came handy during the COVID-19 loack-down when employees were operating from home.

Results: Good employee retention, low cost of operations, very few errors, time saved during transport, report work from home facility provided to employee, improved data security through cloud system.