While India rejoices as facility after facility is being permitted to reopen, the manufacturing sector is silently reestablishing its clout as the driver of the economy. Buoyed by strong demand from the markets, India’s manufacturing sector grew exponentially in November, at the fastest pace recorded in ten months.
The Purchasing Managers’ Index reflects this streak. Anything below 50 represents contraction, and 50 itself indicates no change. In November, this figure rose to 57.6, the highest since January, and the fifth straight month that it spent above the 50 mark.
New orders from factories also picked up sharply, the sharpest rise since February, driven mostly by domestic demand. Factories too increased their head count to keep up with galloping demand.
Two waves of the pandemic and recognition of manufacturing as an essential activity have convinced the sector about two things: the need for quality facility management to keep the workplace hygienic and running smoothly, and the logic of contracting this responsibility out to an experienced service provider.
Regulations mandate a certain hygiene protocol; fiduciary sense dictates that a production unit outsources all non-core functions to a third-party, and focuses on its primary, profit-making operations. Facility management providers are fully prepared to perform each of those functions, in a more cost-effective and time-efficient manner.
In the coming issues, we will dig deep into a wide range of FM functions by for manufacturing segment. In this one, experts discuss topics as diverse as housekeeping in a steel production unit to maintaining a factory’s solar power plant for maximal power generation to looking after the hand hygiene of food handlers in a food processing business. Watch this space for more.
- Case study: Mammoth machines and nerves of steel
- Utilities audits and planned preventive maintenance reduce costs
- The how and why of solar panel cleaning
- Digitisation, data, downtime and decision-making
- Clean hands make food products safe
- Food-safe chemicals for food safety
