SFL’s 17 Indian plants win Deming Prize

Sundram Fasteners Limited (SFL), part of $7.2 bn TVS group, has won the prestigious Deming Prize for all its 17 plants in India. The TQM initiative at SFL was driven by its Managing Director, Arathi Krishna. The 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 being created by TQM and decided to implement TQM in a systemised and unified manner across its plants. 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 17 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 6 years.”

She further added, “Winning this award is a confirmation of the practices that we have been implementing at all 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 the 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 get this recognition. The Deming Prize will be formally presented to SFL on November 14, 2018 in Tokyo.