Guwahati-based Manjushree Innovations is a state-of-the-art flexible packaging company in Northeast India with a planned installed capacity of 18000 MT per annum. Started in March 2017, the company houses a complete setup for flexible packaging starting from blown film lines through printing lines to lamination, slitting and pouching lines. The BRC certified company produces multi-layer films and pouches for packaging items like milk, oil, salt and other food items. Its major clients are ITC Foods, Tata Chemicals, Jyothy Labs, Godrej Consumer, Marico, Amul, Fena, GSK and Dabur to name a few.
With a built up area of 1.25 lac square feet, Manjushree Innovations is designed to handle 1500 MT laminates per month. The company has an additional 20,000 sq. feet of storage space near the main plant. “Right now we have an installed capacity of 675 MT laminates per month. We wanted to take a more systematic approach towards growth by coming up phase-wise. In the second phase, we will add another 800 to 825 MT capacity to reach the full capacity of 1500 MT per month,” said Puneet Agarwal, director at Manjushree Innovations. The company is currently producing around 600 MT laminates per month.
Manjushree Innovations is the fifth plant of the group. The group’s first unit, Manjushree Polypacks, was set up in 2000, which is into printing and lamination. In 2002, to leverage the strategic advantages of backward integration, the company set up Kakarania Innovative Systems in Byrnihat, Meghalaya to produce in-house multilayer and monolayer films to meet the film demands of Manjushree Polypack and other secondary packaging requirements. In 2008, the group started a retail product division by the name Manjushree Packaging which produces BOPP self-adhesive tapes. A year later, it set up a bag making division, Excellent Gravure Industries, in Kalapahar, Guwahati. It also has a retail outlet, Manjushree Plastics, in Fancy Bazar, Guwahati which works as a showroom for all its products and services.
“The Northeast is a huge market for laminates, and flexible packaging as a whole. In terms of laminate consumption, we see it to be at least 3,500 MT per month. Today, you name a company and it is there in the Northeast: Frito Lays, Patanjali, ITC Food, Emami, Godrej, Amul, Horlicks, Hygienic, Marico, Con Agra, Britannia, HUL and Dabur to name a few. There are also a lot of pharma companies here such as Sun Pharma, NatcoPharma, Hetero Pharma,” said Agarwal.
A glimpse at the plant
Manjushree Innovations has highly automated multi-layer blown film lines from Kabra and Windsor, which are not only high output machines but are equipped with state-of-the-art automation of auto width, auto gauge controls to provide top notch quality to its customers.
For printing, the company has a high speed 9-color ELS gravure presses from Pelican equipped with the latest automation of viscosity control, turn bar assembly etc. to match diverse industry requirements. In addition it has other printing lines to cater to its customers’ quick and shorter run SKUs as well.
The company has multiple lamination machines – solventless laminators from Nordmeccanica and Bobst, and a solvent-base laminator from Pelican. It also has extrusion lamination facility from Fonkee, Taiwan. In addition, the company has multiple high speed slitter-rewinders from SP Ultraflex, and pouching machines from XL Plastics and Galaxy.
The company has its own ink kitchen and has a state-of-the-art quality lab which is also used for new product development. “We don’t have a separate R&D facility as such because our lab is equipped to do any kind of product developments with respect to flexible packaging,” said Agarwal.
Quality management system and talent nurturing
“Being BRC certified, we are able to deliver increased customer confidence in our products’ safety and quality as well as promote greater transparency and traceability in the supply chain. We are a system driven organization which means we have all our processes and procedures in a SOP format. Since all our processes and procedures are documented in a structured way, anyone who joins Manjushree is able to start off immediately on the right foot by ensuring processes meet recognized standards, clarifying business objectives and avoiding expensive mistakes,” explained Agarwal.
Manjushree continuously focuses on developing and deploying the correct set of skills for its team. “Once we recruit an employee, we design a training calendar for him. Training is provided after which we collect feedback before allowing him to perform on the floor. This is followed by performance review. So this is a systematic approach which helps us to run our plant efficiently 24 x 7.”
With such structured practice in place for talent nurturing, one cannot deny Manjushree’s contribution towards creation of talent pool for the packaging industry in the region. “About five years ago, there were only few packaging companies in Assam,” said Agarwal. “When new companies started coming to Assam, we became their first and easy headhunting ground. In fact, we lost some of our good talents to them. However, we had a good bench strength and people who had been working with us had faith in us and stood by us.” According to Agarwal, more than 90% of the employees at Manjushree are localites.
FlexiBiz ERP from Kiran Consultants
Manjushree Innovations also has a robust ERP system from Noida-based Kiran Consultants. “We have implemented Kiran Consultants’ FlexiBiz ERP system, customized to our needs to take care of our entire production processes in a real-time basis. Today our capacity utilization is almost 80-85% in just two years. It is an achievement which is really unheard of while it is tough for companies to achieve even 70-75% capacity utilization in such a short span of time. We have been able to scale up so first because we have a very strong back-end and IT systems in place. The FlexiBiz ERP has been operational at our plant since day one,” said Agarwal.
Northeast India – country’s new industrial hub
There is no doubt that Northeast India is the new industrial hub of India with so many companies now moving toward the northeast because of the multitudes of tax benefits being offered by the ‘North East Industrial and Investment Promotion Policy (NEIIPP). The benefits include income tax exemption and capital investment subsidy on investment in plant and machinery, among others. Consequently, many companies are shifting their manufacturing units from places like Baddi, Himachal Pradesh to Northeast.
“There are multitudes of benefits in establishing a new industrial hub in Northeast India. One is to counter China’s impact on India. Development of Northeast India is very important to counter China. Another benefit is that from Northeast, we can tap the Southeast Asia market. We are connected by road to Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines and Laos. This gives us a lot of opportunities to do exports. India has friendly neighbors neither in the west side nor in the north side. In south, we have just Sri Lanka. But if you see towards north-east, there are a lot of countries which are connected via road. Some time ago, I took a road trip from Guwahati to Bangladesh. I started at 9.30 in the morning from Guwahati and had my dinner in Dhaka at 12 am. Now we also have direct flights from Guwahati to Dhaka which started from 1 July19, giving a big boost to the growth of the region. Hence, there is a huge scope for India to grow economically by promoting industries in Northeast India,” concludes Agarwal.
