'Country should set up Productivity Council'

Ramani Kangaraarachchi

Sri Lanka should set up a productivity council and formulate a national strategy after having a good framework, Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Quality and Productivity President Sunil G Wijesinha said at the AGM of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Quality and Productivity at the Post Graduate Institute of Management. He was speaking on `A National Productivity and Quality Obsession; The Need of the Hour'.

He said the modern concept of quality is to create a quality enterprise where good quality is obvious and making Sri Lanka too a "Quality Country" is the need of the hour and the country need to understand why the knowledge of productivity concepts and techniques, or even basic awareness is still low in the country, despite exhortations by the government that it should focus more on improving productivity.

Wijesinha said in Sri Lanka the closed economy did not encourage manufacturers to aim at high quality, and as a result customers resolved to accept poor quality, because during the period of the closed economy, productivity was not a major focus, although many of the large industrial corporations, and some private sector companies had specialized industrial engineering departments.

Even these were mostly shut down soon after the economy was opened probably because of the increased profitability resulting from the increased demand. Even the National Institute of Business Management (NIBM) which was originally set up as the Management Development and Productivity Centre to promote productivity veered away from its primary task.

The US is still the most productive country. Sri Lanka is in comparison to the US not too bad but hopefully the country should be able to accelerate, particularly in view of Sri Lanka set to host the ICQCC in 2014.

"Therefore it is important for all managers especially in industrial organisations to be aware of the pioneers, their work and what they have achieved," he said.

He said although labour productivity is not the only way of measuring the productivity of a country, it is nevertheless a very good guide. It is usually calculated by dividing the country's GDP by the number of workers.

There are some complications however because the average number of hours of work per day may differ from country to country. A low labour productivity figure is often misinterpreted by some people to mean that it is a result of a lazy workforce. While that also may be true, the real impact on the ratio is from the value that is created. Many factory workers in Sri Lanka work very hard but they work on producing relatively low level products where the market value is low, unlike their developed country counterparts who may work even more leisurely, but on high value electronic components.

"Sri Lanka's labour productivity has been going up over the years, and shows impressive growth. The labour productivity of Sri Lanka is still higher than that of our South Asian neighbours: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. However, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong are higher.

Sri Lanka's labour productivity is only 14% of that of Hong Kong. While Sri Lanka's growth is still impressive, we have potential to do more, and others seem to be growing faster," Wijesinghe said.