What are the most difficult aspects of building and running a food manufacturing/processing plant?

 

The advent of new technology and lean manufacturing processes combined with a strengthening economy, the manufacturing industry is experiencing a resurrection of sorts. Still, despite all the good news in the manufacturing world challenges continue to exist.

Challenges of Manufacturing in India:
 Power availability: The major challenge in Indian manufacturing is Low power availability. Due to unavailability of power 24 hours per day, there is decrease in productivity and efficiency, and lower output rates.

Skilled Labour: According to Deloitte there will be somewhere between 2 million and 3.5 million unfilled Manufacturing consultant jobs by 2025.However, as technology has advanced, manufacturers find themselves not just in need of employees, but employees with a different set of skills. As certain tasks have become automated and machine sensors have become more commonplace, allowing manufacturers to collect large amounts of data, the jobs makeup in manufacturing is shifting. Manufacturers now need employees with a high-tech skill set and possessing an analytical mind. The need for a largely unskilled, trainable workforce that once made up much of manufacturing is shrinking as technology becomes more prevalent.

Labour Productivity: Labour productivity is lesser in India than many competing countries. This is because of lag in supply chain management, transportation, production planning, and maintenance.

Project Management: To get products to market manufacturers must adhere to extremely tight and stressful timelines. In the manufacturing space, projects are typically time, cost and quality sensitive and as a result tend to be tightly controlled and rigid. Manufacturers that miss deadlines risk losing out on millions of rupees in potential revenue and profit. Such tight control and rigidity means less ability to update scope or make adjustments as the project progresses. Many of these projects require a design commitment early on, with little flexibility to adjust as new information emerges or requirements change. That can be quite frustrating for a team that wants to produce the best product they can but is handcuffed by deadline constraints.

Intellectual Property Protection and Enforcement: IP protection and enforcement is an expensive and high risk in India. Another challenge with IP rights in India is that India is currently going through some significant IP reforms, which make things more complex and, at least for now, uncertain.

“Intelligence” from Machines: Increasingly, the Internet of Things (IoT) is being utilized by manufacturers, with a majority of companies either having already implemented, or in the process of implementing IoT devices and machines .With these “smart” machines, organizations gather data that can help them implement predictive maintenance and improve productivity. However, gathering the data is the relatively easy part. Aggregating and analysing that data is a little more challenging.

While organizations may have smart machines already on their shop floor, many of them do not have the systems in place to extract and analyse the data being captured by these systems. In this sense, manufacturers are missing out on a critical opportunity: leveraging real-time data on cycle times, quality yields by machines, production run, utilization and other metrics. The entire manufacturing industry needs to improve upon their data mining capacities so they can make faster and better real-time decisions.
 Cost and Fragmentation of Transportation and Logistics: Transportation is very costly and slow in India. It can take long delivery time to get products to the coasts from some places in India. Furthermore, logistics are inferior. The positive point is that the Indian government notice this problem in infrastructure and is working to resolve it.

Fortunately, there are ways manufacturing consultant can leverage the latest advancements in technology to face these challenges head on and continue their upward momentum with little disruption. New Government has simplified many compliance and reduced paper work. This is giving a confidence to young India that we are about to change and helping them to focus on running their business more efficiently.