Prize awarded for seventeen plants in one shot
Sundram Fasteners Ltd. (SFL), part of $7.2 bn TVS Group, has received the prestigious Deming Prize for all its seventeen plants located in India. The TQM initiative at SFL was driven by its MD, Ms. Arathi Krishna.
receiving the coveted Deming Prize in Japan
The popular Deming Prize is a highly-acclaimed quality award presented by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) to companies that have achieved breakthrough results by the application of TQM.
SFL experienced distinctive performance benchmarks created by TQM and decided to implement TQM in a systemized and unified manner across its plants.
Ms. Arathi Krishna, the first woman MD ever to receive the award, said: “It is especially gratifying that SFL has managed to simultaneously win the Deming Prize for all its seventeen different plants which cover a range of technologies from casting to forging and products and customer segments from aerospace to commercial vehicles to cars and wind-mills in a short span of six years.”
She further added: “Winning this award is a confirmation of the best practices that we have been implementing at our plants. It is a testimony to our persistent drive towards quality and catapults us to be among the best companies globally.”
She also commended the total employee involvement in the TQM journey and said: “the cooperation of our people and their singular focus to succeed has helped SFL make quick and successful strides in reaching our goal.”
SFL has already won international acclaim in quality by being a pioneer in TPM, having won the TPM Excellence Award from JIPM, Japan in 1998, the first in the engineering industry to have been honoured with the recognition.