Thomas Dose, MD, BMW Group Plant Chennai at ET Smart Factory Summit 2025India’s rise as a manufacturing hub is no longer a distant ambition. It is a present-day opportunity. But to realise its full potential, the country’s industrial sector must rewire the way it approaches production. Speaking at a recent industry summit, Thomas DoseMD, BMW Group Plant Chennaiand a long-time advocate of manufacturing transformation, argued that flexibility will define the winners of the next industrial age. He was speaking at ET Manufacturing’s Smart Factory Summit organised in Chennai.
“The future is not about being smart for the sake of it. It’s about staying relevant in a volatile world,” said Thomas, addressing a hall full of manufacturing professionals and technologists.
He added, “We’ve moved from machines driving factories to factories needing to think like products, lean, purposeful, and focused on the customer,” reflecting on his own journey from working at ZF in Germany to embracing the Toyota Production System in Japan.
He noted how early manufacturing was organised around technology silos such as turning, milling and heat treatment, efficient in isolation, but disconnected from the final product. Throughput times stretched into weeks. The shift to lean manufacturing in the 1990s brought product-centric cells that drastically improved output and quality by aligning every activity with cost, quality, and delivery.
This evolution continued through mass production and global outsourcing, but introduced new vulnerabilities. Complex global supply chains, long lead times, and distance from end-users created fragility, challenges that became painfully visible in recent years.
Rigid systems are obsolete in a volatile world
“The way we’ve made money in the past won’t work in the future. The model must change,” Thomas declared, urging the audience to reconsider long-held assumptions around asset utilisation and cost predictability.
He recounted a visit to a BMW supplier in India, where the entire plant was configured to serve one client. “The machinery was perfect but it was locked into one product line. That kind of rigidity isn’t sustainable anymore,” he explained. In a market defined by shorter product lifecycles, unstable volumes, and unpredictable foreign exchange rates, manufacturers must move toward multi-use, easily reconfigurable assets.
This shift, he argued, calls for a new class of factory, autonomous, workforce-independent, and capable of running 24/7 with minimal intervention. Order management, logistics, production planning, and quality inspection must all function within a real-time, AI-enabled infrastructure.
Smart must serve a purpose
“Smart must have purpose. Possible doesn’t always mean practical or wise,” Thomas cautioned, as he challenged manufacturers to avoid technology for technology’s sake.
Using the evolution of mobile phones as an analogy, he described how tools originally designed for communication morphed into powerful data harvesting machines. While the global mobile phone market is valued at over $500 billion, the market for trading the data extracted from users exceeds $900 billion.
“We must ask ourselves, are we building smart factories, or just data factories?” he said.
The takeaway was clear: smart manufacturing should not be reduced to buzzwords or blanket digitisation. Instead, it should be a tool for enabling business resilience, responsiveness, and sustainability.
Process first, then digital
“If you digitise a caterpillar, it doesn’t become a butterfly, it just crawls faster,” Thomas said, earning knowing smiles from the audience.
He urged manufacturers to look inwards before going digital. Recounting his team’s early steps in digital transformation, he said their first action was to shut down all computers. Without dashboards and KPIs to defend, morning meetings turned into proactive conversations about preventing future problems, rather than post-mortems of past ones.
This reset, he explained, created space for genuine collaboration and process ownership. “Technology can accelerate your mindset, but only if the mindset is right to begin with,” he said.
Thomas called this philosophy the “Ilia principle,” based on Indian wisdom and lean thinking. His upcoming book, set in Chennai and centred on a young woman who transforms a factory using lessons from her grandmother, aims to share this approach more broadly.
India’s moment on the global stage
“India is the next big thing. But we must be ready. Not just with machines and manpower, but with mindset and purpose,” said Thomas, concluding his address.
He noted the increasing interest from global manufacturers in India as a sourcing base and industrial partner. But he also cautioned that India’s long-term competitiveness would depend on quality consistency, agile processes, and preparedness for uncertainty.
The message to Indian industry was clear: now is the time to invest in flexibility, rethink digital priorities, and align every action with a larger purpose.
“Make it simple. Make it smart. Make it purposeful,” he said. “That’s how India will lead, not follow in the future of manufacturing.”
