12 May 2022
Competitiveness is a way to measure any nation’s productivity and is indicative of its prosperity. Competitiveness results in growth and improved income levels, helping economies grow more sustainably and inclusively. In today’s globalized environment, competitiveness is the key to the survival of businesses and a country’s economy. The Indian industry, especially the manufacturing sector, has been challenged with regulatory complexities and high cost of doing business in the past. This, however, is changing rapidly now, with a huge emphasis of the Government on improving the ease of doing business and reducing the cost of doing business.
The industry needs to focus on enhancing its internal competitiveness, especially in the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) sector. A highly vibrant and dynamic sector with over 60 million units, the MSME sector provides employment to more than 110 million people (just next to the agriculture sector), accounting for 28% share of GDP and 40% share of exports.
In the wake of the pandemic, the MSME sector, like various other sectors, has been adversely affected in terms of productivity. Going forward, the efficiency and productivity enhancement of MSMEs is important for economic recovery and growth.
Quality and quest for excellence form the bedrocks of an organization’s competitiveness. The concept of quality extends beyond the product or service quality and equally expands to quality of leadership and people.
Adopting quality and excellence practices will help the MSMEs build organizational competitiveness, agility, stakeholder focus and futuristic thinking. MSMEs which adopt quality and business excellence practices, standout in many ways, including but not limited to:
Demonstrating agility and resilience
Creating a safe, vibrant, and productive workplace, with motivated people
Focusing on continuous improvement and transformation through contemporary practices brings a competitive advantage to the MSMEs
Focusing on creating value adding products and services
Creating aligned supply chain – upstream, internal and downstream
Creating a formal and futuristic organizational structure, with emphasis on leadership and people development
Formulating effective strategies for today and tomorrow
Building a customer centric culture and providing superior customer experience
Focusing on environment, social and governance aspects and creating a brand image of responsible organization
Demonstrating commitment to all legal and regulatory requirements, by striving to be ahead of the standard norms
The CII Institute of Quality follows a cluster approach to build competitiveness among MSMEs through sharing, learning and improving with a healthy peer competitive spirit is one of the highly successful models, tested over many years.
Skill development is another critical driver for competitiveness, in addition to fulfilling social objectives by providing meaningful livelihood to the youth.
With the advent of Industry 4.0 and increased digitization, the need for skilling, re-skilling and up-skilling has emerged as a priority. India will add 183 million people to the working age group of 15-64 years between 2020-50, post which, the working age population will start to decline. Therefore, the demographic dividend is available to India for the next three decades only. To leverage the existing and upcoming ‘demographic dividend’ of the nation, a robust skilling ecosystem needs to be provided to the youth to make them job ready.
India has emerged as one of the leading nations in the world. Its young demographic profile and vast pool of skilled and trained manpower has put the Indian economy on a fast growth trajectory. The Indian economy is highly resilient and has a huge untapped potential in terms of manpower resources. The Indian industry must tap this potential by playing a key role in skilling the youth of India, for boosting worker productivity.
Join the CII Business Summit 2022 to understand how how can factors such as quality leadership, adoption of quality and excellence practices, skill development and training, and adoption of modern technology help the sector to become globally competitive.
Watch 1st CII ‘Being Future Ready’ Business Summit 2022 on CII Youtube channel: http://youtube.com/FollowCII