Empowering India’s Manufacturing Future: Actalent and CMTI Collaboration
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Bhanu Prasad Jakka, Senior Manager, Manufacturing Services, Actalent
- Could you please provide an overview of the collaboration between Actalent and CMTI?
Through our partnership, Actalent and CMTI will initiate projects together and approach business challenges collaboratively. This will create powerful synergies, covering the spectrum from conceptualisation to manufacturing technology, and bringing together services and research to create value for clients and support India’s manufacturing sector.
Specifically, we anticipate that CMTI’s Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing expertise – in addition to its strengths in the predictive and preventative maintenance and forecasting space – will improve productivity, efficiency and utilization for our Fortune 500 OEM clients.
- Does the collaboration between Actalent and CMTI align with and support the Make-in-India initiative?
Actalent’s partnership with CMTI aligns perfectly with the Make-in-India initiative. Our engineering expertise coupled with CMTI’s technology will enhance India’s capabilities in smart manufacturing and, hopefully, lead to growth for India’s indigenous technology and product development efforts.
For example, we are working towards partnering with companies that plan to set up automotive semiconductor chip manufacturing in India, in line with the Indian government’s goal of being self-sustainable in this domain. We also serve as both a design and manufacturing technology partner to global OEMs who manufacture earth-moving equipment for the Indian market, for private and public infrastructure.
- What impact is expected on the Manufacturing Technology industry due to this collaboration?
Our partnership will bring together Actalent’s decades of experience working alongside some of the world’s largest OEMs and CMTI’s deep expertise in research, academics and technology.
Through our work with Indian customers, we bring global industry best practices more broadly into the local market. With this partnership, we will couple those best practices with CMTI’s core manufacturing technology accelerators. This combination ultimately stands to support the companies contributing to the Make-in-India initiative.
I’m looking forward to the impact this knowledge-sharing will have on manufacturing best practices both in India and globally.
- How will this collaboration contribute to skill development within the manufacturing industry?
The partnership will allow our engineers in India to gain experience working with Actalent’s global OEM clients. That knowledge development will directly support efforts to cultivate India’s manufacturing workforce.
Likewise, through CMTI’s research and historical data we can bring highly engineered low-cost solutions to OEMs, which will help optimize manufacturing technology and ultimately add value to the broader industry. This is a perfect example of the research and services communities coming together in a way that will enhance India’s manufacturing sector.
There is also a point to make about talent “reshoring.” While recent restrictions have limited the migration of talent from the West to India, there remains a strong desire among many Western-based professionals to return to India. These professionals typically seek out comparable positions to the ones they held in the West. Companies like ours – with deep experience working with OEMs and significant scale in India – are an attractive choice for those professionals. This “reshoring” of talent directly supports the Make-in-India initiative.
- How will Actalent’s partnership with CMTI enhance customer satisfaction and flexibility?
Flexibility is undoubtedly a key advantage of our partnership and will have an indirect impact on customer satisfaction. CMTI’s technology is adaptable and can be tailored to suit any customer’s needs, whether it’s basic processes or advanced algorithms.
Western companies possess these technologies, but the key differentiator lies in the speed and cost of access. By offering an alternative route and expertise we accelerate the integration of these innovations. This contributes significantly to India’s economic growth, as we not only share technology but also provide the technology required.
This transformative approach elevates India to a different league, shifting from being a traditional importer of machinery, akin to importing from Switzerland or Germany in the past, to becoming an exporter of cutting-edge machinery.
- In what ways is the Manufacturing Engineering sector in India incorporating Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 technologies, and how are these innovations benefiting the industry, including improvements in efficiency and competitiveness?
Industry 4.0 is characterized by its flexibility and is best described as a journey that involves defining the starting point, end point, and significant milestones along the way, to develop a digital transformation plan that will meet a customer’s objectives.
Industry 4.0 accomplishes this by enabling each technology to talk to each other and operate cohesively. It is also about data management—monitoring, deriving, capturing, and analysing data over a period of several weeks.
Today, product lifecycles are short, and they can evolve many times over the course of even just a year. So, with the implementation of smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0, you can precisely predict the factors that you need to tweak in order to achieve an intended outcome.
- What are the primary challenges faced by the Manufacturing Engineering sector in India as it strives for sustainability and smart manufacturing, and what strategies are being deployed to address these challenges?
A key challenge is compliance with regulations from the government and international bodies around green initiatives. Compliance is mandatory and pivotal for business continuity.
Actalent is well-positioned to help manufacturing companies comply with and develop processes around smart energy management and enterprise asset management. We can help companies boost efficiency and reduce losses, especially when the goal is to reduce the usage of limited resources and minimize carbon footprint.
