Excellence is the key to stay in the run in the contemporary industrial world with cut-throat competition. Running behind excellence and ingraining practices that promote excellence is the only way one can achieve continual and sustainable development. Like our every newsletter, in this edition, we have brought you a saga from the world’s sixth-largest automotive lighting manufacturer and India’s second largest auto component manufacturer – Varroc Engineering Limited. Mr. Anoop Sharma, Associate Vice President – Operations (Electrical & Electronics Business Unit) – India shared his thoughts and views about his Operational Excellence journey and how Team Faber helped them keeping their core values intact while delivering quality product to their clients and ultimately propelling them towards excellence.
Faber Infinite (FI): We have a subscriber base of around 20,000 readers across 8 countries, our readers would want to know more about your company Varroc Group, which happens to be one of the largest automotive component manufacturers.
Mr. Anoop Sharma (AS): Varroc Group, founded in 1988, is a global tier-1 automotive component manufacturer and supplier of exterior lighting systems, plastic and polymer components, electrical-electronic components and precision metallic components to passenger car, commercial vehicle, two-wheeler, three-wheeler, and off-highway vehicle (OHV) OEMs directly worldwide. With 36 world-class manufacturing facilities and 16 R&D centers in 12 countries, Varroc group is on an exponential growth trajectory clocking a sale of 1.6 billion USD in 2017-18. The company is one of the leading global passenger car lighting suppliers and amongst the top 2-wheeler automotive component supplier in India. Varroc offers the best design solutions that give customers a competitive edge in their market. Varroc’s vision is to be an INR 200 billion company by the year 2020.
FI: That’s wonderful Mr. Sharma. Going ahead, every industry has its own challenges. What are peculiar challenges unique to your industry?
AS: Automotive sector is a very competitive market. It is not an easy market to be in and survive different technological disruptions.
According to me, the first challenge is to be ahead in technology trends. There are many new norms that have come up in the automotive industry and more are planned in the coming years. Organizations need to be ready for disruptions in the market. Being able to cope up with technology upgrades and establishing your leadership through the transition is a challenge in our industry.
Another challenge, I feel, is keeping employees up to date with new technology & retaining them as well. A happy and engaged workforce that adapts fast to the changes will not only help the company to grow but also support the customers to grow as well.
FI: Progressive teams of Varroc are charting their own success path and setting trends for others to follow. What is the core philosophy that differentiates your organization from others?
AS: One thing we have always talked about and believed in is ‘Excellence’. As an organization, all our efforts are focused on achieving excellence. This is something which sets Varroc apart from other companies.
Other differentiating factor is our core value SHIPS, which we are proud of. They comprise of Sincerity, Humility, Integrity, Passion and Self – discipline, and form the core guiding principles for employees across the spectrum.
It is these values that bind us all together and help us in creating a better level of understanding and bonding between the employees to ensure better performance and opportunities for the organization to grow.
FI: We would love to understand more about the operational excellence journey at Varroc.
AS: We started our Operational Excellence journey back in 2007-08 with Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) program with an objective to grow and comply with our clients’ demands. We achieved remarkable results from this and grew significantly. Since then, we have come a long way and the importance of Operational Excellence has also grown. We are witnessing growth at a very fast pace and it becomes crucial for us to evolve our approach for a continuous and sustainable development.
For this, we initiated a program called “Manufacturing Excellence” under which we are developing and executing different initiatives to get excellence in different areas of operations. We are marching towards upgrading all our manufacturing facilities into lean, clean and visually pleasing ones.
FI: We appreciate that under your able leadership the organization has shown great results in the continual improvement journey. We would love to know your views on Faber’s role in the growth numbers?
AS: As I mentioned earlier, we started with TPM to set us on a growth trajectory but decided last year to change our approach for better operational results while keeping TPM as the base tool. This was when we got associated with Faber Infinite.
We have secured very good support from Team Faber in terms of planning & executing our different excellence programs to achieve desired goals. Value Stream Mapping is one of the first initiatives where we engaged with Team Faber for training purposes and identified the scope of increase in throughput.
Later, Mr. Vishal Kulkarni from Faber Infinite got involved with us to create a framework for our Manufacturing Excellence roadmap and has really helped us by providing valuable inputs.
Team Faber has been instrumental in sharing important methodologies with my team and helping them in implementation for a foolproof operating environment along with making our processes greener and eco-friendly.
We believe that improvement is a continuous process and we will continue to better our practices. With Team Faber Infinite, Varroc looks forward to achieving more in the future and it will be a long-term and fulfilling journey for both parties.
We thank Mr. Anoop Sharma and team Varroc for being a part of iFaber – the official newsletter of Faber Infinite and sharing their valuable insights.
Written & Compiled By Faber Kishlay & Faber Mayuri
