Maruti Suzuki said it will help set up training centres for its more than 400 of its supplier partners by 2020.
These centres, named DOJO, have been conceptualised by Maruti Suzuki for training employees before they start working on the shop floor. The implementation and investments are done by the partners.
Ensuring quality
“For OEMs, over 80% parts are manufactured at the vendor’s end,” said Ajay K. Tomer, executive director (corporate planning), Maruti Suzuki. “So, ensuring quality at vendor-end is critical. Enhancing skills and exposure of best manufacturing practices at vendor level is one of the most vital initiatives for Maruti Suzuki.” DOJO means ‘a place of the way’ in Japanese and is used to refer to a place where people are trained in martial arts.
“The centres will serve as a workshop that will help in skilling, acclimatizing and thoroughly preparing workers, especially new workforce before they join work at manufacturing plants,” he said.
Till now, the company has brought on board 90 suppliers. One such training centre is at the Manesar plant of Uno Minda, which invested about 12 lakh to set up the centre in 2016. The workers here are trained for 17 days, post which they are given a certification.
“We have till now trained about 400 people. These training centre help improve productivity and efficiency. Here employees are not only introduced to technical parameters but also best Japanese manufacturing practices… we have seen a drop in attrition rate too since this centre has come up,” Nirmal Minda, CMD at Uno Minda said.
Uno Minda has set up such centres in 40% of its 58 manufacturing plants and plans to have a DOJO centres at all its plants.
