International Quality Academy in Chennai (published in India Express and on newindpress.com February 1, 2005)

CHENNAI: It is fashionable these days to talk about India Inc and its prowess in various fields like IT, biotech etc. But silently the country has also been making rapid strides in the field of quality standards, such that soon an international academy will come up in Chennai.

Disclosing this to this website's newspaper in Chennai, Chad Kymal, chairman and CEO of Michigan-based Omnex Inc said, 'The facility will come up off Old Mahabalipuram Road adjacent to Crompton Greaves facility by May and offer training in international quality standard tools like Six Sigma.

We will also have academies in three or four other Indian cities this year." He maintained that the target audience for these academies would be top managers, middle management, quality managers, engineering graduates etc.

An immediate fallout of the academy would be large-scale exports of Indian quality managers to the international arena. For starters, Omnex would look at Six Sigma Practitioners for Coca Cola from India, said Kymal.

Today Indian enterprises are slowly realising the importance of quality standards as they go global, he said.

"A few years ago enterprises would laugh and dismiss talks about ISO, Six Sigma, Kaizen, CMM certification etc. Now they are competing with each other to score distinctions like Deming Awards etc," opines Kymal, who is also a well-known international quality consultant holding credit for more than $100 million in savings through Six Sigma.

He is also the founder of the Omnex consulting methodology that brings about significant turnaround in performance.

But the obsession with quality also has a flipside. In their endeavour to bag these distinctions, sometimes compromises are made often leading to a bad image for the country.

"We have an excellent pool of skilled manpower and with the right training in quality standards, they could soon outbeat others in the international arena," he adds.

Speaking about the auto component industry in the country, Kymal said, "Indias pricing is still competitive compared to China. Good Indian companies are going to "double, triple and quadruple" in size. This is more so as estimates have put 1.18 million vehicles in India this year.

China, despite its rapid progress on the infrastructure front, does not have the Internet infrastructure.

Western business houses are also unsure as to what is transpiring in the Chinese mind, said Kymal.

"India must capitalise and leverage its strengths in information technology and workforce. These are great times," the quality guru adds.