Centre of Excellence: How to Ensure Success? Insights for Change for Betterment - Where Innovative Ideas Function Together with Excellence Processes !!!

A Center of Manufacturing Excellence, or CoE, is a centralised place where best practices are formulated based on knowledge and data from a company’s experience. These practices eventually reside in its culture, so that companies can set standards for the organisation and implement them consistently across all plants and areas.

It is an environment for testing new emerging processes and a tool for discovering, monitoring and disseminating manufacturing improvements.

As global competition continues to increase, industries are becoming increasingly competitive and production control needs to implement these improvement centers in order to lay a solid foundation and a sophisticated manufacturing system.

Objectives of the centers of excellence

A Centre of Excellence (CoE) is a vital component of any organisation wishing to achieve a digital transformation in its business.

Objective: to create operational initiatives aimed at increasing productivity, reducing costs and improving the quality of production.

Goals: to achieve increased and expanded production, achieving economies of scale and reduced response time, to generate additional workflows and lower production costs.

Benefits of having a center of excellence

• The correct allocation of resources and the prioritisation of projects according to their added value have a very positive financial impact. It saves time, increases responsiveness, agility and therefore reduces delivery times, improving the speed to market and the final customer experience.
• This center acts as a link between the individual parts of the business and develops measurements for each location, providing governance and communication between them. Companies achieve significant improvement in communication, empathy and data democratisation, thus synchronising supply chains.
• CoE centralises information; all project participants can easily access any information they need and contribute new ideas regardless of their department or geographical location. With CoE, companies become more collaborative and are prepared to benefit from global data and cohesion between areas.
• To make operations flexible and production capable of responding proactively to change, centers of excellence are responsible for creating standard processes that, along with automation, allow for essential variations and mass customisations. These types of control centers are in charge of preventing problems and generating reports that help in strategic decision making, in order to make the company evolve and strengthen.
• Centers of excellence present an opportunity to consolidate best practices and new technologies in one place central to production, certifying efficient processes and spreading them where they make sense. The result is an improvement in the product and service, allowing to achieve consistency in manufacturing and establish significant KPI standards for the quality of the result.
• These centers restructure resources and operating costs by eliminating inefficient practices and reducing the time to implement new skills and technologies. They promote intelligent automation and measurement because they are committed to investing in new technologies for digitising and exploiting data. By having a defined ROI, they can measure and test organisational impact very effectively.

How to ensure your success?

When it comes to COE, there doesn’t seem to be a standard model. It has a complex implementation process that integrates a set of best practices and working standards. It is a combination of people, processes, and technology that affects almost every activity in a global manufacturing process.

To ensure its success, although it depends largely on each organisation, there are some points to follow:

• Ongoing employee training: provide direct and indirect guidance and support to help plants implement these working standards. If the ultimate goal is digital transformation, guide and train employees to take advantage of new tools and exploit the value of new technologies.
• Well-defined objectives: as a basis, there must be a specific goal that pursues measurable, achievable and precise objectives. The CoE’s vision must always be aligned with its overall business strategy.  The vision of the center must coincide with the vision you have for the business.
• Internalise the predisposition to change: it is a question of culture and it will only happen if the talents are united and a global system of communication is created so that the relationship between the parties flows.
• Create a budget plan: include estimates on staff salaries and operating expenses. Poorly designed CoEs can end up costing the company more money than they bring in benefits, so it is important to pay attention to the financing structure of the center. There is no reason why CoEs should not operate with other businesses. For example, the CoE could be established as a joint venture between two or more companies.

New level of manufacturing competitiveness

The development and implementation of new technologies and the elimination of costs are the objectives of these centers, which are essential for manufacturing competitiveness.  Their main function is not to diagnose problems but to help identify and execute the short list of improvements that will really generate value.

The creation of a Center of Excellence is designed to benefit all stakeholders; employees, customers and shareholders. Processes almost always support a mission-critical function or business requirement, so they must be internalised and supported by a solid action plan.

A center of excellence (COE), also called excellence center, is a team, a shared facility or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area. Jaipur Engineering College (JEC) is setting the standard through Center of Excellences.

JEC COE is an eco-sensitive initiative to make a coexisting, inclusive and sustainable environment for a quality life of humans and all other living partners with a vision to create a campus ecosystem of balance and influence. COE is a multi-year program carrying projects of environmental sustainability, to create a grand eco-future. This initiative aims to build a sustainable ecosystem by 2025, the 26th year of JEC, and to continue to exhibit the acts of sustainability, for sustainability being omnipotent.

Everyone has dreams to make the country big and democratically successful. A country where there is equality in all areas and for all genders it witnesses progress. Like others, JEC also have a dream for our India and the way it should be so we can proud to live and the coming generations too. Our country in 2050 will be what we create today. The year 2050 will be the landmark year to look at India through the prisms of development, growth, gender, equality, employment, and other factors. What we dream is what we see, similarly, how we visualize India of 2050 will determine the revolutions we will adopt over the next twenty-five years. One wants to see India free from poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, corruption, and other social evils. Over the next twenty-five years, India should transform into a powerful nation both internally and externally.

Over this, our foremost target as a developing nation JEC has come forward to work on economic fronts and make our economy stronger by bringing in some major reforms. To support this vision JEC has created some center of excellence to train the students in the line of skilling requirements. Besides the economic sphere, there is a need to work towards gender equality and providing equal opportunities for all irrespective of their background.

JEC sees it as a place that has abundance opportunities of development and growth.

How We Do It

We facilitate bringing together a corporate group to act as a leadership team for the business. Whether this is departmental or cross business, the team would address a particular area of focus for the organization. Areas we focus on include:

·         Leadership & Strategy

·         Strategic Change & Oversight

·         Structural Design

·         Standardization

·         Business Alignment of LOBs

·         Direct Management

·         Mentoring & Guidance

·         Research

·         Training

·         Support

Currently following Center Of Excellences (COE) are functional as an Outreach Programs

CISCO Networking Academy

Open SAP Academy

FOSSEE

Engineering for Change (E4C)

ORACLE Academy

Infosys Springboard

IIRS Outreach Programme

Let’s Sum up…

The creation of center of excellence and many initiatives are going to bring outreach opportunities which in turn result in the

Technologically up date learning outcomes

Highly competitive knowledge and skills to excell in tough industry situations

Fostering engineering for change depending on your accumulated know-how at the organisation