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ALFA - Executive committee meet

The executive committee for 2010-2012 met for the first time in CLRI - CLAD meeting room on June 19, 2010. Being appointed as Joint Secretary by the President Thiru Gnanasekaran, I was also privileged to attend the meeting.

This is not the official minutes of meeting or transcript. This is my personal take on ALFA activities and what is going on. It is always good to have more transparency without affecting official functioning of the association.

I have been a member of EC in the outgoing committee headed by Thiru Sadhashiv. Two years back my closer interaction with ALFA started.

I feel that members do not wear the badge of ALFA -  A C Tech Leather and Footwear Alumni Association - in their day to day professional activities. When you meet a Vice President of say IFLMEA (Indian Finished Leather Manufacturers and Exporters Association) for business, he is prone to mention the association with IFLMEA. ALFA has not yet gained that pride place in the minds of Leather Technologists and Footwear Technologists.

The activities are largely confined to CLRI and its world view. With many ALFA members working in CLRI, they take active interest and run the day to day activities. Some posts are reserved for CLRI staff to facilitate the process.

In the first few meetings all the newly appointed committee members enthusiastically attend and share their views. Everyone has a strong drive to get things improved and to build a stronger ALFA for all alumni. But not much has changed from the days I graduated in 1993.

Every year, final year B Tech students join the association and pay life time membership fee. Since there is no annual fee, the burden of funds generation falls on sponsorships by companies through members.

Annual activities are  Annual Get Together on February 2 every year, ALFA foundation day, ALFA orator award, AGB. Other seminars and felicitations as organized by the EC.  It is quite something to do this much. Many other alumni associations might not even meet once a year. But, there are other alumni associations which have much stronger coherence and networking.

Any professional association thrives on the networking and brotherhood among the members. Members should have a sense of belonging. That is the challenge in front of ALFA today. The activities of ALFA are at best entertaining (a dinner), it is not enriching professionally. Once we get that going, association will strengthen.

“What is in it for me?” answer to this question should be given to the members for the association to thrive.

Let us see what happens in the coming years.

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By masivakumar – June 19, 2010

Seminar on “Need For Skilled Designers” in Leather Products Sector

Seminar on “Need For Skilled Designers” in Leather Products Sector conducted by EDI at BM Das Memorial hall in CLRI. There was good representation from the INDUSTRY. The presentations were carried real stuff into it.

Dr Krishnamma Naidu welcomed the gathering, the key take away he addressed the gathering was that EDI is organizing a Training course for skill laborers in Footwear and Goods Industry and for the same EDI will bear the cost of Rs 20K and the company sponsoring the candidates will pay Rs 6K towards the training fee. He asked the industry to sponsor 40 candidates comprising 50% with experience and 50% new to the skill.

Mr Chandra Mouli, chaired the event - he voiced clear and wise on the challenges faced by the industry and suggested that we should encash our capability of handling Environment issues. He suggested that we should package our delivery for value add - doubling our business can mean increasing volume or increasing value or by increase of both volume and value - to increase value is a brainy work. He too added that value could  be brought in by being creative / innovative and by creating and following Fashion trends. He remarked that our history carried lot of ethinic designs and that CLRI is doing documentation of the same - he suggested Industry to do effective marketing of the same

Mr D M Parikh, Project Director & Faculty Member - EDI gave a breif note on what EDI has planned to do in 2010-11. These BDS Development Project for Leather and Leather Product Cluster units in Chennai facilitaed by EDI are

  1. Web-site making
  2. SPV formation
  3. a. DPR for Wind Energy Generation Project and CDM registration, b. DPR for Common Facility Centre
  4. Collateral Free Loan facility, guidance and preparing Bank application
  5. Cleaner production technologies
  6. Social Audit - 8000 Training and Implementation
  7. IT and MIS training
  8. Enterprise Resource Planning, Training and Implementation
  9. Energy Efficiency audit and Implentation
  10. Leather Footwear and Garment Designer’s training
  11. Soft skill training for workers and supervisors
  12. Training for Business management organisation (BMO) - Executive and Staffs
  13. Training for preparation of application for technology modernization scheme
  14. Training on Management development programme for owners & key person s of MSME Leather units

Mr Parkih welcomed industry and BDS Service providers to register themselves to avail the facilitations of EDI. Visit www.chennaileatherbds.com Mr Balasubramanian, of Vision Unlimited has elaborated on the statistics study he has carried out  - “Gap analysis for need of skill” - the key statistics that was catchy to me in the study is “Inability to Handle Delivery pressure is 38% in Footwear companies, 42% in Garment industry and 42% in Goods Units. His colleague’s remark on Learn, Unlearn and Relearn carried lot of sense for the designers in the industry to take up. They talked on Audio / Video aids & tools and E-learning for Training and Re-training.

They remarked Sustenance of any program is dependent on

  • Industry Support
  • Change Management
  • Training Modules
  • Awareness creation
  • Feedback mechanism
  • Review and action plan
  • Continuous review and improvement

Mr Sengupta from NIFT entered the dais as a student and shown up his indepth experience and knowledge in designing - he quoted that NIFt gives both Long term and Short term courses on designing - he mentioned that NIFT’s short term courses are conducted in the evenings between 5:30 PM till 8:30 pm. The important point he talked about was on deriving idea for a design - it should originate from the Understanding need of the customer. Another key note is that “The maker should also be a user” - then only he will know what problems the user will face - so that his design will address the shortcoming - Few examples he has given were Crediit card holder’s size in a wallet, Garment without attaching a lining at elbow (problem can be found only when it is worn). These are the few areas our manufacturers should encourage designers and makers to use the product locally.

Mr Krishnaraj, talked about designing in Garments - the session was like a class with lot of information, usage of computers for making faster and multiple design works - his session was more on Engineering part of designing. One example he has shown how use of computers can impact marketing presentation to a buyer was on variation of colours on a jacket prototype

Some of the design software he mentioned are

  • Auto CAD
  • Ainpes CAD
  • GERBER Accumate
  • LECTRA Modaris & Dimino
  • GEBBER Vision fashion studio
  • V Stitcher (GEBBER / BROWZ WEAR)
  • ELITRON 2D Leathergoods

Mr L Murugan, Scientist at Footwear Division - CLRI, also did an excellent presentation on Footwear designing, touched up many points same as Mr.Sengupta. He mentioned that the key reasons for less designs from India are

  • absence of local fashion market and
  • proximity of global fashion

He and Mr M Viswanathan, ILIFO have shared their project on training 31 people from footwear industry by Italian experts and their visit to Italy. Mr Viswanathan briefed very clearly on the process they followed in getting this job done - the process was so clear that it has been done with perfect thought and efforts put in on to it. Mr Viswanathan mentioned that 3 of the footwear companies have sent their new innovative designs for approval to their clients and some are getting positive responses.

Mr C Viswanathan, EDI has thanked the gathering.

If the Industry is set to cooperate and think ahead these people can certainly give bigger hands for the upgrade. Industry should make use of these facilitators in right sense withering the old thoughts.

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By alnachiappa – June 18, 2010

What is key challenge in todays business?

What is key challenge in todays business?

Vote your views at polls at LinkedIn

http://polls.linkedin.com/poll-results/92459/gsnqq

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By alnachiappa – June 16, 2010

Turbulent waters

“The business is good. We have got a lot of orders, so do almost everyone. BUT, the costs are not workable. Raw material prices have gone up by 29%, chemical prices are increased. EURO value is going down, we are squeezed from all the sides”

“Whoever manages this period and minimize losses will come out stronger”

Founder, owner of a very successful leather company in Chennai said this.

It was the US first, now it is the turn of Europe - Greece, Portugal, Italy. Leather industry is an innocent bystander, affected for no fault of ours.

Tighten the seat belts, conserve energy, invest in cost saving measures, become lean and mean.

The next two years would be challenging at best.

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By masivakumar – June 14, 2010

Leather Making - Material vs Processing vs Art

According to a veteran of leather industry who supplies machinery and machine tools to tannery leather making is

  • 33% material
  • 33% art
  • 33% technology

In India, cost of finished leather comprises of

a. Raw material ~ 60%

b. Chemicals ~ 20%

Investment on machinery, plant overheads, labour, selling expenses and PROFIT all are covered in remaining meagre 20%.

With this formula, tannery managers and owners spend most of their time on procuring raw material. One who has a good control on raw material purchase (in terms of quality and prices) is successful. Investment in advanced technology, modern management methods OR brand building exercise are not given priority as these would affect only 20% of the business revenue.

Even with this structure, improvement programs are implemented focusing mainly on optimum utilization of leather and chemicals. Innovative processing methods, improving energy efficiency, reducing labour cost all are counter intuitive in this situation.

In a positive scenario where creativity is encouraged and brand building is under taken, we can aspire for a ratio of

Leather - 30%

Chemicals - 20%

Processing - 20% (machinery, salaries, tools)

Marketing - 20% (brand building etc)

Profit - 10%

How does one move from material dominated business to innovation dominated business. The later one generates more value for the business for sure.

Posted in Business, Management, Tannery.

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By masivakumar – December 24, 2009

Mr. Maria Selvaraj passes away

We express our deepest condolences to the family of Mr. Maria Selvaraj who passed away last month after a protracted illness.

Mr. Selvaraj is a graduate of Leather Technology from Alagappa College of Technology (& CLRI), Chennai. He graduated in 1989. He setup and nurtured a successful Raw Material sourcing business and extended it to Wet Blue supply and Finished Leather exports. His business was operated under the name Apma Leathers.

Mr. Selvaraj has been a dynamic entrepreneur and adapted modern methods of management. After diagnosed with cancer in 2005, he closed down his business in an orderly manner (as is his custom in whatever he had done in business) and spent his last years in prayer and social activities.

We pray for the departed soul. We will always carry his gentle manner of interaction and business practices grounded in reality.

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By masivakumar – November 2, 2009

Build your intranet

Introduction

Interaction, discussions and communication among employees of a company leads to increase in effectiveness and business growth. We can deploy modern tools like Email, Intra company net, Chat, Calendar for such productivity boost.

Details

By going to yourcompany.com you should be able to login and access documents and information related to operations of the company.

Intranet :

Set up a system similar to dynamic websites on the internet. This can be used to

  • communicate management decisions to all the employees even on daily basis – content management system
  • encourage creativity among staff by giving them opportunity to write suggestions for improvements – blogs
  • encourage healthy discussions among staff – discussion forum
  • document processes and knowledge base of managers – Mediawiki knowledge base

This can be hosted in an internal server for use in single location OR hosted on the internet and accessible over internet for multiple location and travelling managers access.

Email & Chat

All emails of a company should be in the form of name@companyname.com .

  • Use of personal email addresses and outside domain name email addresses show lack of professionalism in the company.
  • Creating and disabling email addresses for new and leaving employees should be within the control company managers. If personal email addresses are used, business correspondence will be sent to the person even after he leaves the company.

Even though setting up and configuring email/chat service in a server is possible, continuously updating spam filters and virun scanners requires an experienced system administrator. We recommend that the company can avail free service provided by Google Mail where you can have 100 email accounts with name@yourdomain.com .

Your domain can be associated in Google Mail

  • all users will be able to have individual email addresse
  • chat with each other while online
  • share documents
  • even organize meetings.

Through admin account, the management can keep control of who is using which account and create and disable accounts.

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By masivakumar – October 28, 2009

Total Quality Management

In the traditional practice, quality control is a function separate from production. For example, in the Leather Finishing Unit I worked there are department managers working under Production Manager and quality control managers working under Line In Charge.

Production departments are primarily focused on productivity and meeting targets in terms of volume. Line managers are responsible for verifying the quality of output at the final stage and intermediate stages.

This approach is suitable for mass produced products where producing more leads to less costs (economies of scale). Rejection rate due to quality reasons can be 10% or 20%. Cost of rejections is recovered from the acceptable products.

In short, quality is an after thought in this system.

Statistical Quality Control methods are tools used in identifying rejection rates in different products, lines, departments.

1. While moving into customized products and service sector statistical quality control methods are not sufficient. It is not acceptable to have defective products. Identifying and correcting mistakes after production is expensive for producing small number of customized products.

A. Let us say that the batch size for Product A is 100,000. The set up time for production is 200 hours. Processing time for each unit is 36 seconds.

With this volume, the factory with capacity of 10,000 units per day would be processing only Product A for 10 days.

Total production time for 100,000 units = 200 hours + 100,000* 36 seconds = 200 hours + 1,000 hours = 1,200 hours

Let us say 10% are rejected and reprocessed = 10,000 * 36 seconds = 100 hours

Total processing time = 200 hours set up + 1,300 hours production = 1500 hours for 100,000 units.

Impact of end of pipe rejection on cost = 100/1500 = 6.67%

B. Let us say batch size of customized product is only 1000 per batch and set up time is engineered to 20 hours per batch.

The factory will change set up 20 times a day. For any end of pipeline rejections, set up is to be repeated which will add to the total processing time.

Total production time for 1000 units = 200 hours + 1000* 36 seconds = 20 hours + 10 hours = 30 hours

Let us say 10% are rejected and reprocessed = 100 * 36 seconds = 1 hours + 20 hours set up time

Total processing time = 20+10 hours for first production + 20+1 hour for rejection production = 51 hours for 1,000 units.

Impact of end of pipe rejection on total cost = 21/51 = more than 40%

C. In service business effective batch size is 1. Each service delivery is unique and customer should be satisfied. Extending the calculation above will lead to 100% costs for any defect in process.

D. Customer dissatisfaction due to exposure to faulty service at worst OR delay due to reprocessing at best is a major source of business loss when statistical quality control methods are followed.

Total Quality Management Systems build quality into the processes / production itself. Each stage / person in the assembly line of production / or service delivery ensures quality before it is passed on to next stage / person.

There are many ways this is explained :

  • Quality is built in, not an after thought
    Everyone in the company have quality in mind, not only the quality control department
  • Quality is free.
    Doing it right first time reduces cost of manufacturing. You dont have to deal with handling of rejected products and spend time/materials on reproducing them.

2. Approaches

A. ISO 9000 series of quality systems are defined by European countries to ensure processes in their supplying units located in third world countries. While manufacturing units relocated to China, India and other developing economies, European buyers wanted a certification process to ensure that proper processes are followed in the factories.

ISO 9000 focusses on

  • Documentation of business processes
  • Records to show conformance to documented processes
  • Certification after evaluation of documents and records for their robustness
  • Periodical internal and external audits to monitor change management and continuous improvement of processes

B. Six Sigma is the quality control system followed by Motorola.

Sigma refers to standard deviation of statistical points. 3 sigma refers to less 6.7% rejection rate. 6 sigma refers to less than 0.00034% rejection (that is 3.4 defects in million transactions).

To achieve Six Sigma status, the business processes have to be designed suitably (as done by ISO 9000 systems).

C. The Japanese follow Kaizen, Atarimae Hinshitsu, Kansei and Miryokuteki Hinshitsu

To draw parallel to sports. Statistical Quality Control focuses on results produced by the athlete. TQM works with life style, training, coaching and physical fitness aspects of athletics so that results are obtained.

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By masivakumar – October 12, 2009

Death knell to proprietory licensed software

There is a mailing list to discuss and support Linux and other open source software activities in Chennai. Indian Linux Users Group - Chennai operates with the email address ILUG-C <ilugc@ae.iitm.ac.in>

About 5 years back it was a sleepy group. There will be occasional emails every week or so and members will meet once in a month to passionately discuss issues concerning Free and Open Source and work on them.

For the past 2 years the situation is completely changed. There are 20-30 emails exchanged every day. A number of college students and IT professionals actively participate in the discussions.

In colleges, training centers, software companies and government projects Free (Freedom) and Open Source software is hotly discussed and ardently taken up topic today.

  • What happened?
  • What is this Open  Source / Free (Freedom) Software?
  • What happened in the immediate past?

What can an individual do against the might of Governments and huge commercial companies? That is how we react to the changes and circumstances around us. One man did not accept what is given to him and decided to chart a history of his liking, the result is what we see today as Free (Freedom) and Open Source Software movement.

In college, work place or society it is beneficial to share information and work with each other. When we exchange ideas and knowledge, the giver and recipient both end up having more ideas than before the exchange as against material exchange.

Knowledge exchange can also lead to synthesize of new ideas by combining the exchanged information. That is how science operates over centuries. The result of research by one scientist is published, peer reviewed and accepted by the scientific world. Others can take the knowledge as the foundation and work on further problems. As Newton put it “I stand on the shoulders of giants who strode the world before me“. This benefits individuals as well as society at large.

With the advent of computers in the second half of 20th century, software needed to operate these computers were also developed. Software is written in human readable languages using alphabets of English (a to z) numbers (0 to 9) and some symbols in computer languages like C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP. The software code is in text format. You can open the source code of software in a text editor and read it.

However, computers need not understand this natural languages. For computers everything has to be converted into 0s and 1s. After software is written in text format (called source code), it is compiled and converted into binary format. This binary format can be interpreted faster by computers but can not be understood by humans.

For making any changes to the software, source code has to be modified, recompiled and new binary format created. Without source code the software can not be modified.

Creating a commercial middle entity between source writing software developer and binary using software user was tried in late 1970s. A successful proprietary software industry is well underway by early 1980s. The business model of these companies relies on keeping source code of software as proprietary and distributing only binary format to users. The user can run the software and use. If there are any bugs or issues, or user needs any changes/improvements they are solely dependent on the software vendor for the same.

To free computers and users held captive by these proprietary software companies, Free (Freedom) and Open Source Software movement was started.  A host of software projects from Linux operating system to thousands of user programs are result of Free and Open Source Software movement which freed software users from the clutches of proprietary vendors. It is called Free Software to reflect free(dom) nature of software source code.

1. Mr. Richard M Stallman was a senior computer programmer in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab in the 1980s. He was passionately against the tendency to restrict availability of source code for commercial interests. His voice did not have much impact in the 1980s when closed source proprietary software industry was on a rampage. However, he did not give up.

In 1983, he started GNU project to create a replacement for the UNIX operating system widely used in the 1970s and early 1980s. He set up Free Software Foundation in 1985.

RMS has been working tirelessly for the past 25 years with a war cry “Free Software for the users” and functions as the brain behind the Free (Freedom) and Open Source Software movement as we see it today.

2. RMS releases all software written by Free Software Foundation under GNU GPL license. He also encourages and advocates others to do so. Software available under this license provide both Binary format as well as the Source Code to users.

Buyer of the software can use it in as many computers as they want, make copies of the software, modify source code and create binaries as they like, share  with friends, neighbours,  or even distribute to others for a price.

Only one condition : While distributing the software (modified / un-modified), the receivers should be given the same Freedom described above. The seller can not place any additional restrictions on the users.

3. In 1991, 32 years old Linus Torvalds was doing his Masters degree in Computer Science at Helsinky University, Finland. To explore the new Intel 386 computer he received as a gift from his mother, he wrote an Operating System kernel and called it Linux. He chose to release the source code of Linux operating system in Internet under GNU GPL license

Others can download, use, modify, develop it further, distribute to friends and commercially sell it. The only condition is that they may not place any restriction on the rights of buyers of software.

After Linux kernel is released in 1991, fortunes of software industry has irrevocably changed. Linux Torvalds has been guiding and leading development of Linux kernel from then.

4. The next notable contributor to Free (Freedom) and Open Source software is an American company, Red Hat Corporation.

For the Operating System to be usable to end user, someone has to collect software libraries and various utilities available with Free Software Foundation,  combine them with Linux Kernel, test, add modifications and provide as a convenient package. Under the license mentioned above anyone is free to do this business based on Freely  (Freedom) available software.

Red Hat is one of the pioneers in making Linux operating system commercially accessible to enterprises. The company was started in 1994 and its turnover in year ending February 2009 was US$652 million.

5. Linux and other Free (Freedom) and Open Source Software thrive based on collaboration among software developers in different parts of the world using internet. Students of computer science can use these internet collaboration tools to improve their competency.

SourceForge is a platform with which lakhs of software developers collaborate to work on thousands of software projects. Sourceforge.net provides free (free of cost) tools needed for such collaboration - Mailing Lists, Source Control, File Download and Webpages.

To discuss, share and learn issues affecting Information Technology industry slashdot.org discussion forum is a happening place. Started by a US student in 1997, the discussions attract best and brightest in the software world.

Indian Linux Users’s Group - Chennai has its website at ilugc.org.in

6. In 1998 January, the first web browser which made World Wide Web happen, was open sourced. Netscape could not take on the crushing and often unfair competition from Microsoft and decided to take Open Source route to fight back.

The result is Mozilla project and FireFox web browser which have taken the internet browsing world by storm in the past 5 years.

7. In 2001, IBM announced plans to spend US$ 1 billion to promote use of Open Source software in the market and successfully carried out the plans. Other biggies like Sun Mircosystems, HP are also forced to adapt to a world where Open Source software matter more and more.

8. Some of the major Free (Freedom) / Open Source Software available today are :

  • Operating Systems - Linux, Open Solaris, Open BSD, Free BSD
  • Office Applications - Open Office, Abiword, KOffice
  • Web browsers - Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome
  • Databse systems - MySQL, PostgreSQL
  • Webserver - Apache
  • Graphics tool - GIMP

9. Hundreds of other successful, useful and robust software applications are available under Free (Freedom) Open Source licenses. Users need not to go and search for individual applications. CD/DVD of a Linux distribution can provide copies of all these applications in one go

There are many options.

  • Fedora Linux (Red Hat)
  • Open SuSe (Novell)
  • Debian (Community driven)
  • Ubuntu (Canonical Corporation)
  • Slackware
  • Mandriva
  • CentOS

and many more.

10. Freedom of choice in Free and Open Source Software

As these projects involve volunteers and companies from different countries speaking different languages choice of multiple language interfaces are provided. KDE which is a Desktop for Linux is available in more than 100 languages. For instance, tamil translations were available in late 1990s onwards. Today, any standard Linux distribution comed with option to use language of one’s choice.

Conclusion

When infrastructure such as roads, ports and railway are accessible to everyone, commercial enterprises can flourish by the efforts of enterprising individuals. Free (Freedom) and Open Source Software movement works with the motive that basic IT infrastructure should not be restricted and be freely (Freedom) accessible to everyone.

For a developing country with unique requirements Free (Freedom) and Open Source software are the viable options.

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By masivakumar – October 1, 2009

Information management for leather industry

How can Information Management help a company in leather industry improve its business operations and opportunities.

As any CEO or business owner would vouch for, right information at the right time is the key for business success. A CEO spends most of his time interacting with employees, suppliers, buyers and investors. A successful CEO would be doing this for most of his/her working day. (A hands on management approach would change this approach to take CEOs time away from information processing.)

Interaction with stakeholders involves exchange of information.

For example,

  • CEO needs to know operation information from employees and pass on business information received from buyers / suppliers and investors.

  • When interacting with a buyer, operation information is to be passed on and business information is to be received.

Management or leadership is essentially the art of processing information and making decisions. Amount and quality of information available to decision makers is a key for right decision making.

Management Information Systems and Decision Support System are the final outcome of a Enterprise Management Software. Management Information Reports and Decision Support Reports will be used by middle managers, top managers and CEO/Owners of business to keep the business in the right path.

These reports might be required by other enterprise stakeholders also. In case of Business to Business segments, buyers, suppliers, investors, government and other stakeholders need information from the business to make appropriate and needed decisions.

Industrial Revolution which started in the 18th century is based on the bedrock of application of mechanical (steam) energy in manufacture of goods in place of human / animal labour. In the first stage, the revolution would have been used to directly replace animal labour with mechanical energy. That does not take advantage of the paradigm shift in application of steam energy. For example, replacing horses of a wagon with a steam engine might not be the best way of deploying mechanical energy for productive use.

Eventually, inventors started designing equipments and appliances which can take advantage of the new force steam engine – thus borne Steam Locomotive, Steam driven mills which cascaded into the industrial revolution.

Even before industrial revolution, equipments and products were manufactured (using manual labour) and used. Steam power changed the whole paradigm of manufacturing and led to tremendous growth in economic activity.

Draw this parallel to information revolution. Any business or even a simple human exchange involves collection, internalization and dissemination of information. From time immemorial information management gives one person advantage over others. In business world, those who can accumulate, assimilate and disseminate information became CEOs, Managers and leaders of successful organizations.

Prior to Information Revolution, information collection, processing, assimilation and dissemination were done manually. Recording data in a ledger, preparing reports, communicating to managers and other stakeholders are done by human beings (compare this with manual labour used to manufacture products pre-industrial era).

Advent of computer technology led to digitization of information. Recording, processing and dissemination of information can be largely automated and handled by machines. Amount of data collected, quality of information processed and speed of dissemination have been revolutionized with mechanical brains (in place of human brains).

Managers and leaders have access to essential information, drawn from more accurate and wider data. This leads to greater insights into operational, market and business situation and enables leaders to make better decisions.

In banking, financial services industries in the beginning and health care, travel, government services, retail subsequently, information tools are put to effective use in developed economies in the last 15 years. Developing economies started catching up with later.

Use of information in manufacturing sector is less obvious. Leather and leather products industry is traditional and largely located in developing economies. As a result information technology tools deployment in leather industry is behind other sectors which is about 10 years behind other sectors.

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By masivakumar – October 1, 2009