Plant visits are organized by AMCHAM’s Tamil Nadu Chapter twice or thrice a year as part of the ‘Sharing Best Practices by Practitioners’ program. This plant visit was exclusively for employees of AMCHAM members and held on May 25th 2018 in Sriperumbudur and Oragadam SEZ, outside Chennai.

Plant visits allow senior executives to build a better understanding of a site’s performance potential, to rally the frontline workforce and to communicate the company’s performance, strategy, and current challenges. Plant visits allow managers to review a supplier’s qualifications, to share best practices with a partner, see innovation at work or to benchmark performance and practices. Shop-floor operators can assess another plant’s operations and apply what they’ve learned to their own factories. Consultants benefit a great deal from these visits.

For participants, the primary objective of plant tours is to learn. The first way to enhance learning is to focus on practices. AMCHAM’s plant tours provide an opportunity to observe how work actually gets done. The visit had 38 participants whose work roles ranged from manufacturing, facilities management, business development, strategy and consulting. Of the four plants visited Dell and Sanmina are electronic hardware manufacturing companies, while Modine and BorgWarner are automotive component manufacturers.