Which step is your plant on?

Last checked: 20 Oct 2026

How the test works

• 10 questions, about 2 minutes. Seven ask what your floor does today, two where your money goes, one what you want from the next 12 months.
• You get a step, not a score. Your step is the middle of your answers, held back by your weakest one: a plant cannot stand on step 4 with a step-1 foundation. If your press answer held you back, the result says so first.
• You get a band, if you know one number. Enter last year's gross value added (GVA) per person and your trade. The result places it against MoSPI's Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) averages.
• Your three moves are ranked for you, by whether your money leaks through idle machines, scrap, escalations or lost RFQs.

What "GVA per person" means here: sales plus stock change, minus materials, fuel, power, job work and repairs, divided by everyone engaged, contract workers included. It is the ASI method, so your number compares with theirs.

The five steps

The band. ASI 2023-24 gives GVA per person for auto parts (₹10.92 lakh), forging and stamping (₹9.41 lakh), iron castings (₹10.72 lakh), non-ferrous castings (₹7.69 lakh) and plastics (₹8.97 lakh). By state, auto parts run from ₹6.59 lakh in Karnataka to ₹20.4 lakh in Rajasthan. ASI has no split by factory size, and product mix moves the number, so read it as a direction, not a verdict.

What a point is worth. In a worked example, a 40-CNC shop on two shifts has 1,92,000 planned machine hours a year. At an illustrative ₹1,000 contribution per cutting hour, one point of spindle utilisation is worth about ₹19 lakh a year. Use your own numbers in the machine hour rate calculator.

Your first three moves, step by step

Each move card in the tool shows what changes, the ₹ effect (sourced or a labelled assumption), cost, time, payback and government support.

Step 1: We firefight

1. Log every stop over 5 minutes on your busiest cell for 10 days. In US government audits of 658 auto-parts plants, productivity measures were 3.1% of recommendations but 14.1% of savings, with a median payback of 0.52 years (US data).
2. Close every complaint with a real 8D. IATF's own interpretation lists six elements, from containment to an updated PFMEA and control plan. One complaint costs ₹2.4–4.9 lakh in a worked example.
3. A signed pre-start check on every press, every shift. In Safe in India's CRUSHED 2026 data, 95% of press injuries were on presses without a safety sensor.

Step 2: We keep the certificate

1. Put a rupee figure on in-house rejection, by part and machine. At the ASI cost mix, one point of rejection in a ₹120 crore plant is worth ₹55–80 lakh a year.
2. First-off approval at the machine, signed before the lot runs. Set-up verification and the control plan are on both IATF top-10 lists.
3. Claim the certification money. ZED Bronze's ₹10,000 fee is offset by a ₹10,000 joining reward. Maharashtra refunds 75% of quality certification cost, Karnataka 50% up to ₹5 lakh.

Step 3: We measure every line

1. An hourly board by machine and a 15-minute morning review. In a randomised trial in Indian textile firms, daily meetings and boards raised productivity 17% in the first year (Bloom et al., 2013).
2. Quick changeover (SMED). In one forging plant, die changeover time fell 43–45% (2024).
3. Break the setter queue with a skill matrix and a second setter. In US audits, operator training paid back in a median 0.31 years.

Step 4: We remove losses

1. Planned maintenance with MTBF on the bottleneck. One North Indian unit cut breakdown time 23% and raised OEE 17% with TPM (2018).
2. Join a structured cluster. ACMA reports 211 plants in its Advance Lean Cluster, ₹348 crore of savings and an average payback under 70 days. These are ACMA's own programme figures.
3. Get a funded energy and compressed-air walk-through. In US audits of 1,783 metal-trade plants, fixing air leaks paid back in a median 0.20 years. ADEETIE refunds an energy audit up to ₹1 lakh for medium units in listed forging and foundry clusters.

Step 5: We win new programmes

1. Quote the next RFQ on measured hours before you buy a machine. In a worked 12-machine cell, recovered losses alone are worth about ₹4.4 lakh a month of sellable capacity.
2. Bid for import-substitution and EV carry-over parts. India imported US$12.3 billion of components against US$12.1 billion exported in H1 FY26, and EVs were 4.6% of supplies to OEMs (ACMA).
3. Turn your system into export proof. Tamil Nadu refunds certification required by importing countries up to ₹10 lakh. Only about 2% of ZED certificates are above Bronze.

A note on government support. The ZED and Lean guidelines print a validity to 31 March 2026; no extension order was found on msme.gov.in or dcmsme.gov.in (checked 17 Oct 2026). A Ministry of MSME release of 4 August 2026 still describes ZED as operating. Ask your MSME-DFO in writing before you count on a subsidy. PLI Auto is not a route for most medium plants: it required ₹500 crore group revenue on FY2020-21 accounts. ACMA's cluster programmes are mainly for members, and Mama cannot promise access. Details are in government money for auto-component suppliers in 2026.

Where Mama fits

On steps 1 to 3 the hard part is seeing which machines stood, and why. A clipboard and reason codes work. Mama is another option: it reads the cameras a plant already has and sends the owner a short morning note on which presses and CNCs stood, and for how long. It watches machines and flows and never ranks operators. From step 4 up, the moves are about maintenance, clusters and customers, and the cards say so.

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FAQ

Is this an IATF, ZED or ACMA maturity level? No. It is a self-check for owners. For official levels, see ZED (Bronze, Silver, Gold) and the MSME Lean scheme (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced). IATF 16949 is a certificate, not a level, and your certification body decides what conforms.

Why GVA per person and not OEE or PPM? India has no published national OEE or PPM dataset. ASI value added per person is the only official benchmark for auto-component plants, published by state and trade. It has no split by plant size, so the result shows a band, not a rank.

My GVA per person is below the average but I answered step 4. Which is right? Possibly both. Labour-heavy work such as harnesses and assembly sits lower without any inefficiency, and contract labour booked as job work distorts the ratio. If neither applies, unsold machine hours are the usual cause: start with 10 days of stop records.

Do government schemes pay for cameras or software? No. ZED and Lean pay for assessment, certification and consultants. ADEETIE and state policies pay for energy audits, certification and some equipment. None of them covers camera systems, including Mama.

Sources for every figure are listed below. ₹ figures marked as worked examples are illustrative; replace them with your own numbers