New market entry – Making it happen in a challenging new geography

New market entry – Making it happen in a challenging new geography

Setting up a greenfield manufacturing project in a complex market like India is a huge challenge and those who have done it will vouch for that. The myriad of complexities could start from the governmental and statutory approvals, vendor identification, ability to attract and train the right resources and all these need to translate to producing quality products, satisfying the customer, ensuring costs are optimal and profits are maximized!

This important multiyear new market journey envisaged the following deliverables:

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  Identification of key vendors to ensure that necessary project and statutory approvals are obtained, including to build the project itself.
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  Facilitating and front ending for the organization with the local authorities, customers, banks, and other partners
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  Identify and hire key resources to support the project plans for commissioning and ongoing production and seamless transitioning of supplies from an existing European location.
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  Design the training plan for the operations team to ensure process adherence and delivering high quality parts at optimal costs
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  Direct the teams through a well thought out strategy to import, install and commission key capital equipment managing the complexities of import process, duties, and taxes
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  Ensure seamless launch with minimal disruptions to customer and one that is scalable & sustainable.

We helped the organization have one its most successful launches without any glitches or impact to the customer – all in a record time of 15 months from groundbreaking, delivering the following:

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  Project launched with minimal overrun of the underestimated budgets. Overall project was eventually completed at USD 21Mn
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  Hiring of the entire functional and operational leadership team for the site acting in the role of the business leader. The challenge was to attract the resources for a company that was little known in the Indian market but had a fantastic reputation globally with the OEMs.
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  Design of the entire organization, reporting relationships, people policies and full statutory compliance.
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  Delivered over 800 man-days of training for key operational resources in one of the company’s European plants – for people who have never travelled overseas and with limited language capabilities at both ends
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  A fully scalable plant – both physically (to deliver over a million parts / year) and from a people / process perspective

The greenfield project at an investment of over USD 20Mn was one of the most successful launches for the organization globally – achieving operational breakeven in 10 months, securing the coveted / prestigious customer’s quality award in short span of 15 months, near zero attrition, zero accidents over 650 days, lowest manufacturing costs for a specific operation – A proud moment for all involved and leading us to a more longer-term engagement of a different nature!