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Encouraging talent, the Nokia way

CHENNAI: World-class manufacturing systems, best-in-class quality, lowest cost production and just-in-time delivery have been the mantra for the mobile handset making giant Nokia. Within two years of its entry into India, the small town Sriperumbudur, near Chennai has become a hub for manufacturing mobile phones for the company.

The Nokia Telecom Park, a special economic zone, when completed would house eight global and domestic component suppliers and create 30,000 jobs by 2009. Nokia already had provided jobs for 8,000 people, which would go up by another 2,000 in another two years, said Sachin Saxena, Director (Operations), Nokia India.

Addressing a group of journalists, after a plant visit, Mr. Saxena said Nokia India had not only given importance for making mobile phones but also taken care of its employees and their environmental standards. It had been motivating the talent pool of its workers with the introduction of Kaizen Championship programme. Mr. Saxena said, “The idea created by one of the employee’s, namely, the wheel chart for identifying the language used in the mobile phones has been appreciated and accepted the world over. Nearly 95 per cent of the employees get involved in the Kaizen Championship and try to contribute 100 per cent. When the company launched the programme, there were 5,000 entries,” he added.

With an initial investment of $150 million in early 2006, Nokia in a four-year period had already invested $210 million in its Chennai operations and recently announced a fresh investment of $75 million to enhance the capacity of the plant.

Within two years, Nokia has reached production volume of 125 million handsets. “This was possible because of the world-class manufacturing facility and its just-in-time delivery,” he said. The two sections of the plant, which consists of board assembly and final assembly takes care of these factors. Board assembly is where the mother board being assembled with components and the customisation takes place in the final assembly plant.

Today, Nokia India is exporting ’made-in-India’ cell phones to more than 50 countries. About 50 per cent of the production from the plant is consumed domestically and the balance is exported to countries across West Asia, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

On the Nokia Telecom Park, he said at present it had seven global component manufacturers. These were: Salcomp, Aspocomp, Foxconn, Perlos, Jabil, Laird and Wintek.

Of these, two suppliers — Salcomp and Perlos — had already commercially operational. The Chennai plant plays an integral role in Nokia’s global production network for mobile devices and is the tenth mobile device manufacturing facility globally.

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