NITIE's way of Nation building through its Industry Outreach

With volatility becoming the norm in today’s world, industries are counting on industrial management techniques not just to enhance productivity but also to get best practices that might equip companies to affect competition. 

Continuous improvement for higher productivity of producing and operations to extend the worth of a product and repair is that the key role of Industrial Engineer. 

Some of the sharpest minds graduate from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai as skilled professionals that improve industrial efficiency and productivity to become a part of a number of the simplest industries both in India and across the world.

Since its inception, NITIE is at the forefront in supporting many industries in solving their complex problems through industry outreach activity. NITIE is additionally related to various industries for cooperative research through summer internship, field projects, consultancy, and management development programs. the scholars under the joint mentorship of college and Industry Guide are contributing to improving the bottom-line of the many organizations.

Summer Internship Projects(SIP) are mainly focused on cost reduction through waste elimination, quality management, internal control, warehouse productivity, Material Requirement Planning, productivity improvement through automation, Lean thinking, Logistic, Supply Chain Network, and Industry 4.0 technologies (viz. IT, Machine Learning, AI, Blockchain, Data Analytics, etc.) to call a couple of. A number of the projects undertaken by the scholars of NITIE has resulted not just during a rich learning opportunity for college kids, but also in eliminating considerable nonvalue added costs, thus leading to significant cost reduction.

A project completed for a well known FMCG company for its warehouse problem addressed many problems with warehouse management like dock productivity, worker synergy, parking issue, material analysis, planning of pelletized load to a specific distribution centre, etc. to extend warehouse productivity by 15% amounting to an annual saving of USD 65,000. For this, the Methods Improvement tool of IE has been wont to map the warehouse processes, which are then analysed to reach the proposed solution.

Effective inventory management is important for firms to remain lean and efficient. However, inventory holding could have strategic implications, especially for the auto industry, which is at the cusp of BS-VI implementation. during this context, firms got to be extremely careful while holding ageing inventory, which can need to be phased out. This was done through designing a dashboard to trace down the ageing of inventory at the plant also as at the organization level.

Concomitantly, the NITIE intern worked to automate the method of scheduling quite twenty thousand parts that are procured regularly for quite 300 variants of varied commercial vehicles. Initially, a project administered a niche analysis of the prevailing system in executing the MRP run, identified parameters for the successful generation of schedule, administered pilot travel by updating the part master file and designed a process flow chart for implementation.

The project has demonstrated on a pilot basis for 15 vendors during the stint of internship and formulated a roadmap for truth MRP run the entire list of plant vendors on a phase by phase basis. The project enabled the worldwide car manufacturer to trace the inventory levels on a real-time basis and generate schedules to the vendors, minimizing the manual intervention of buyers and streamline the entire scheduling and procurement division. While that specialize in efficiency and productivity, firms cannot undermine sustainability.

A project wiped out the buyer durable segment achieved the dual goal of cost reduction through optimization of processes and sustainability through the reuse of packaging. within the project, the summer intern analyzed the inbound logistics operations of a corporation to scale back the landed cost of raw materials. After As-Is analysis of the Inbound Logistics Network, the project recommended changing the present route for importing, shifting from LCL (Less than Container Load) to FCL (Full Container Load) surely commodities and checking the feasibility of reusable packaging for imports, etc. with a price savings of approx. ₹ͅ 1,00,000 per container.

This stood testimony to critical thinking skills that gave the firm cost optimization advantages while delivering on sustainability goals. Another favourite and exciting domain of NITIE students is that the management of a supply chain network. a number one FMCG organization wanted to expand its operations overseas by analysing the prevailing supply chain infrastructure alongside growth plans and propose a long-term supply chain network strategy.

After analysing the present scenario, the NITIE intern found out a virtual network of the availability chain by considering existing factory locations and potential locations, contributing to most of the demand for brand spanking new sites of factories & distribution centres. The project developed Procurement, Manufacturing and Distribution models to compute procurement cost, make cost and cost for any possible procured item from any point to being manufactured at any plant, and distributed to customers through any route.

The internship project recommended factory consolidation from 10 sites to 7 sites with an addition of two new cross-docking hubs giving a possible annual savings of 15.8 crore INR, with YOY incremental savings and a payback period of three years. A nascent area that has enormous potential within the supply chain is that the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which avoids the cascading effect of taxes hence leading to significant cost reduction for the end-user. GST provides a chance to restructure the distribution networks for potential cost-saving and creating a competitive advantage.

An award-winning internship demonstrated the appliance of IE tools like Clustering, Load-Distance analysis, MILP in reducing the number of warehouses from 35 to 27 with minimization of total transportation cost by 8%; decrease in average primary & secondary transportation distance by 14% & 6% respectively with the improved service level and simplified tracking and monitoring of primary and secondary supply routes using an MIS Dashboard. NITIE has, with time, ventured into projects that involve innovation, development, or technological breakthrough altogether the sectors, be it manufacturing, technology, software, logistics, or services.

This has helped NITIE in aligning with the dynamic market needs, culminating in strong industry ties while also helping in bridging the gap between academia and therefore the industry. Students apply the concepts they learn to analyse business processes for productivity gains and also setting benchmarks for industry standards. Through these outreach projects, NITIE leverages its student base for knowledge sharing and make them industry-ready by giving them opportunities to become tomorrow’s practice leaders. Thus, NITIE constantly endeavours to succeed in its industrial stakeholders through its student force for bringing in business transformation and contributing its bit in NATION BUILDING.