Digitisation of process and automation of facilities are the two areas that the company focused during the pandemic. IT adaptation, therefore has happened without delays says Anil Banchhor, Managing Director & CEO, RDC Concrete
The global pandemic COVID-19 gave a lot of learnings in terms of demand, shifting focus towards RMC etc, what is your take on this?
In fact many lessons, actually it allowed employees to up-skill them to be working in multiple departments. The person who was trained to handle bathing is now skilled to handle quality and other function. This has helped company to address the manpower shortage and reduce cost as existing manpower is multi skilled. For the employees they have a high potential of growth within the company in terms of promotions. At the same time, as the market volumes are going down, the company focused on internal costs by improving operating efficiency, logistics efficiency enhancement, Brough down wastage, and the turnaround time has improved tremendously. These opportunities are now a practice when the market situation rebounded.
This has helped us in reducing our internal costs and also taught us the IT benefits in the RMC segment. E-challans, use of QR code enabled delivery of raw material and installation of RFID based reading machines eases the movement of materials in and out of the facilities.It penetration has gone up in the RMC industry and particularly for RDC India.
You touched upon digitisation initiative in the company, what are the automation process implemented in RDC in this period? And how much was the investments?
We have extensively adopted automation. To the level that a person sitting at home can do the batching at the factory, a person from Nagpur or Hyderabad can operate a plant in Mumbai.The investment is minimum as compared to the benefits like a person can operate 2 plants instead of one, that too remotely.
Was there a major shift towards RMC recently?
A lot of construction workers left sites and this shortage of labours resulted in more customers shifting towards RMC. This reflected well in the segment’s growth rate. The second half of last year was better than the SH of 2019. We have already come to the pre-covid levels in terms of demand. This is primarily because there are a lot of investments coming to infrastructure projects such as Metro along with uptake in commercial and residential projects.
Can you quantify the RMC demand percentage wise for commercial and residential?
RMC demand in commercial is around 40% and retail one can say is around 35%.
Elaborate on the efficiency improvement in RMC sector (quality of material, the way it is being used, any new products)
Rising cost was a major factor. RDC started using ultra fine material which is a mixture that improves the durability of concrete and also reduces cement consumption. So overall cost of concrete production reduced. This was implemented pan Indian basis in our plans and also introduced the mechanised dossing system to put this into concrete. The manual process of cutting the packs and poring into machine is now replaced by automated mechanised operations.
Can you throw some light on the expansion plans?
During Covid time we have increase the number of plants from 46 to 52 (6 new plants). And out aim is to increase the number from 52 to 80 in the next one year (end of 2022). These will be spread across Tier1 and tier 2 cities.