Improving productivity in Indian SMEs

The manufacturing environment is now so competitive that the companies must not only continuously improve their performance, but also do it faster than others. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) significantly contribute to the industrial output of an economy, and must be competitive for the national economy to be competitive in this era of international business. With almost all productivity improvement (PI) tools requiring a working knowledge of statistics, the Indian SME manager with his semi-literate workforce with little or no technical and mathematical training needs a simple and heuristic PI tool that addresses his particular needs. This article proposes a simple scheduling heuristic to improve productivity quickly and effectively and demonstrates its application and benefits through a case study in a spring manufacturing SME.