“We pride ourselves on Jugaad. But the when this Jugaad is documented and successfully replicated, it becomes an innovation,” said Ashok Goel, Vice Chairman & MD, Essel Propack. Goel was the chief guest at the launch event of BMPA’s newest initiative, the BMPA Carton Forum. “Innovation is a nicer way of doing Jugaad,” he said.
The chief guest went on to explain to the 100-plus audience at the Sunville banquet hall in Worli, Mumbai, how he brought his 
BMPA company back to life after few hiccups in the initial years.
Goel seemed to suggest that the secret to success in building any business isn’t such a mystery. He used terms like – ‘challenge the status quo,’ ‘people power’ and referred to the time and motion studies from where one can build a platform for future growth. “Create a strong local market position, solid capabilities and technologies, and nurture your people as a platform from where you can build a business that can propel further growth,” said Goel.
Essel Propack started its operation by producing 60 tubes a minute and today has the machinery capabilities of producing 500 tubes a minute. “All along we challenged our R&D team, and our material and machinery suppliers to help us produce the best and with speed,” he said. “Additionally, we started patenting our products. This prevented our innovations from getting replicated.” said Goel concluding his speech. Today, Essel has more than 100 patents in its name.
Explaining the need for such a forum in his launch speech, the project-in-charge Tushar Bhotica said that the packaging is the highest growth segment of sheetfed offset printing.
“In the last 60 years, the printing industry has come a long way from being focused on commercial printing. Now, like many of the BMPA members, it is changing and evolving into packaging converters,” said Bhotica. “This has brought new concerns and challenges before all of us, for the present and the future.”
In its initial part, the forum focused on certain basic objectives. Technical, industry standards for price and process, financial health and related issues, tax matters, vendor support, and skilled manpower, among others were discussed.“We hope to engage with each one of the stakeholders, on a one to one basis, if possible, for their betterment,” concluded Bhotica, who also presented the vote of thanks.
The launch event also had KM Lakshminarayan, packaging consultant and ex-head of packaging, Colgate India made a presentation on “Emerging global trends in packaging”.
The event was support by HB Fuller, Esko and Srinivas Papers.
