Whether it s manufacturing or software-development India, with its huge pool of sk

illed workers, plays a very important role in Siemens corporate strategy. Many Si
emens products are already in part made in India, and more will follow in the futu
re.
Improving education is the key to economic growth: India s Prime Minister, Narendr
a Modi, is convinced of that. Modi will visit the 2015 Hannover Messe trade show
, for which India is the partner country this year. The Prime Minister will pres
ent his Make in India program at the event. The basic idea behind the program is t
o massively expand industrial production on the subcontinent and increase indust
ry s share of the country s gross domestic product from the current 16 percent to 25
percent by 2022 and create 100 million new jobs in the process. It s a very ambit
ious goal, and Modi has some assistance from German industrial companies, which
have built infrastructure and plants and are now providing training as well.
Siemens is doing its part through the company s Technology Application Center (TAC
) in Bangalore, a city of eight million people. The words Training on and Basic mil
ling blink on and off in a yellow light on a display board with the Siemens logo
outside a hall at the center. Once you go inside, you quickly discover all the t
hings you can learn here. For example, one area houses several latest-model mach
ine tools that are being used to teach trainees how to mill and process metal pa
rts. Meanwhile, in a small lecture hall, an instructor is teaching a course on p
rogramming Sinumerik, the Siemens computer control system for machine tools, wit
h which all of the adjacent machines are also equipped.
Technololgy Application Center
Enlarge image
Siemens Technology Application Center: "School bench" for the training of specia
lists.
Quick course for factory work
Siemens opened the Technology Application Center (TAC) in Bangalore in 2014. The
TAC is one of around 12 such centers that have been established around the worl
d in places such as China, Korea, and Turkey, for example. The goals here are to
train machine manufacturers and their customers in the use of Sinumerik control
s and to work together with them to develop new application areas.
There s great demand for this type of training and cooperation in India, where mor
e than a million people enter the workforce every month. They leave the state-ru
n industrial training institutes
which are comparable with vocational schools in
Germany with a lot of theoretical knowledge. There is no local equivalent of th
e apprenticeship-based German dual education system. It takes six months before w
e can use graduates productively in manufacturing operations, says T.K. Ramesh, M
anaging Director of Micromatic Machine Tools, the biggest producer and distribut
or of machine tools in India. Micromatic generates ten percent of its revenues a
broad, increasingly in Germany as well. It s also one of the many firms that are n
ow taking advantage of the training programs offered for their employees by comp
anies such as Siemens. Micromatic, for example, sends its employees to the Techn
ology Application Center for further training and to learn about new technologie
s. It s a win-win situation because Micromatic also uses the same Siemens machine
controls that its employees are trained in at the center. Not surprisingly, the
courses at the TAC are very much in demand. The center is almost always fully boo
ked, says Bhaskar Mandal, President and CEO of the Industry Sector in India.