QCFI on a mission to train staff of 1L MSMEs

Hyderabad: Quality Circle Forum of India (QCFI) has a taken an ambitious mission to train the employees of one lakh micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the country. The 39-year-old institution represents Quality Circle Movement in India and propagates quality concepts in various organisations to improve the productivity, performance, quality, cost and safety.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken an initiative of 'Make in India' to turn India as a world's factory. To achieve its aim of becoming an Atmanirbhar (self-reliant) economy, the MSMEs play a very important role in this initiative. In India, there are more than six crore MSMEs contributing a major portion of the GDP.

Multi-national companies and large scale industries have specialised departments to train and develop employees to improve their performance and organisational excellence. However, unfortunately many of the MSMEs do not have such facilities and employees working in such firms do not get the opportunity to improve their knowledge and performance.

To bridge this gap, the QCFI has taken the noble task to train these employees at a nominal cost which they can afford. DK Srivastava, Executive Director of QCFI, told Bizz Buzz: "After several success stories in manufacturing and services sectors, we are now focusing on the problems of more than three crore micro level units that are supplying materials to big organisations."

"In a vendor development programme, some faculty members teach them simple concepts to improve their performance. But, the micro units can't pay Rs20,000-30,000 per day. As a non-profit organisation, we are charging Rs 10,000 to train staff of 500 units. This nominal amount is being collected only to bring interest among them," he informed. Srivastava further said: "The MSMEs should look at these costs as an investment for the future. Experienced faculties in manufacturing area will handhold the MSMEs by visiting their workplace, identifying the faults, conducting training programmes and guiding the workforce for improving the work environment. Once there is a change, other units will follow." The QCFI has recently conducted pilot training programme at Gwalior and Aurangabad. On September 5, it has officially launched this and it is going to conduct the programme regularly. It also organises weekly lessons to entrepreneurs across five chapters to achieve 95 per cent growth. The recorded videos of these classes will be shared to 25 other chapters as well.

The non-profit organisation plans to conduct the programme in regional languages too. At present, it has taken 14-15 contract manufacturing units in Telangana, mostly in surrounding regions of Hyderabad. It aims to make five of them as world class manufacturing units. In the same way, it intends to make 39 units all over India as world class manufacturing units. The QCFI provides techniques and tools to staff of its members including government departments, organisations, education institutes, hospitals and healthcare centres – both in public and private sector. Its main objective is to propagate quality concepts to improve the perform­ance of public and private organisations.

One of the major challenges in most of the organisations is not utilising the complete human potential. The QCFI provides mainly Japanese techniques such as 5-S, quality circle, lean quality circle (LQC), lean safety circle (LSC), karakuri kaizen, poka-yoke, total quality management (TQM) and jidoka. These concepts are Indianised to reduce the problems in daily work life.

5S is the short form for five Japanese words, 'seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke' that mean sort, set in order, shine, standardise and sustain respectively. This is a universal technique, which can be applied at homes also. Kaizen means 'continuous improvement'. Quality circles and other management techniques help of employees in solving problems.

SJ Kalokhe, President of the QCFI says: "Though there are only few problems, they appear thousand times during the regular work. If MSMEs complete our modules and tasks, they will get benefits much more than the investment without going up the cost of production. The small scale industries can really make a big difference by accessing the QCFIs wealth of knowledge."

The QCFI has also developed an online learning platform with concept wise modules followed by tasks which can be accessed online. It is organising 46th International Convention on Quality Control Circles (ICQCC-2021) on November 24-27 at Hyderabad. As it is a member of multi country association of 14 countries, it expects 300 teams including 100 teams from abroad. The theme of the international convention is "Quality concepts facilitating societal and economic turnaround". This theme indicates the efforts to be made for improvements and innovations. The event will provide opportunities to exchange view points and search for new avenues to improve process management, value addition and cost reduction. Model Presentation (Case study through model and charts) is introduced for the first time in the ICQCC-2021. The teams opting to display models will be provided one slot of three hours to exhibit their case study on 5-S, quality circle, LQC, LSC, karakuri kaizen, poka-yoke, TQM and jidoka. Also, Model Exhibition and Home Kaizen Exhibition will be held in this convention. It has 35 chapters across the country having more than 10,000 members. Apart from delivering quality enhancement services to its members, it also offers awareness programmes for potential members. It is more popular in manufacturing industry. Now, it is diverting to other sectors also, including IT industry. However, the proportion of the activities is not so large.