People all around the world are living in difficult times as a result of the current pandemic, which has created a sense of uncertainty. Many families have lost their daily source of income, and organizations have been severely impacted, resulting in the closure of some businesses. In this highly globalized era, with interconnected production and financial markets causing a ripple/domino affect, the consequences are being felt by all, including India.
Every industry is impacted, including forging industry. Supply chains have been disrupted, migrant workers have returned home, and retraining them after the lockdown has been difficult. We are still dealing with this issue to this day. As a result, the industry has not fully recovered. The forging industry’s main inputs/designs always came from OE’s and rarely do we get a black box. Taking advantage of the pandemic times, a lot of forging industries have put time into their design and developed flashless forgings to save material and lowered forging costs.
Automation is an expensive process in the forging industry; yet, several of our members have taken the initiative to install conveyors, robots, and machining cells in order to reduce the need for migrant labor while still meeting demand. AIFI will provide optimization of the forging process using simulation software for our members who do not have their own simulation setup. Product design, material saving, optimizing resources and manpower reduction have been areas of focus in innovation.
During the lockdown, AIFI held a number of learning sessions for its members and their employees, which proved to be extremely beneficial. Had a much more relaxed working structure allowing our employees to balance work and personal life considering the current obstacles. In addition, we have progressed our traditional regional meets to a convenient platforms for all our members keeping the interaction ongoing. Also, many conversations and discussions took place over WhatsApp groups, which aided us in dealing with various labour, supply chain issues, which were communicated via this AIFI Platform. The forging industry continues to innovate a lot in terms of product design, but the main blackbox of design is received by the end user. So, in terms of new products, the industry has optimized the forging process by converting parts into net shape forgings, which reduces steel consumption while also providing a benefit to customers. Today, technological innovation and online training courses have topped the list of activities for the majority of businesses throughout the world and we also continue to do so. Finally, I’d like to mention that in order to improve the skill levels of our workforce, we organized several trainings and seminars, such as Steel & Testing of Forging, CQI 9 Special Process Heat Treatment, Quality Improvement, Waste reduction & process management, Tax collection at source (New amendments/rules), and we also invited experts to speak on automation and technology, which will benefit the industry and our members.
