QUARTERLY MAGAZINE August 2024 Vol 16
QUARTERLY MAGAZINE August 2024 Vol 16
Focus
The RPG Innovation Festival is an annual event that celebrates and promotes an innovative spirit across the Group. Over the years, this festival has gained prominence and has become a flagship event, with innovation and creativity at its forefront.
This year too, the RPG Innovation Festival Season 6 culminated in a spectacular event on 1 March, 2024. It was a testament to our enduring commitment to foster a culture of innovation across the RPG Group. We celebrate the exceptional talent, ground-breaking ideas, and collaborative spirit that define our organisation.
Since its inception, the RPG Innovation Festival has become an integral part of our organisational culture, fostering a collaborative environment where ground-breaking ideas thrive.
This year’s event was no exception, with over 1,360 projects showcasing the very best of RPG's innovative prowess. Spanning over four months, the festival began with teams proposing projects, which underwent rigorous evaluation. The top 32 projects were then showcased on Founder’s Day, reflecting our strategic priorities and addressing real-world challenges.
To achieve transformational growth, one needs to have curiosity, agility and creativity. The Innovation Festival, an initiative by the Group, fosters these qualities, and encourages our talent to embrace their creativity while approaching solutions”
Harsh Goenka,
Chairman, RPG Group
The team participation saw a record 2x growth with projects representing a wide array of sectors - infrastructure, technology, and healthcare - fostering cross-functional collaborations.
One of the key highlights of Season 6 was the introduction of several new elements to enhance the festival's impact and engagement. These included:
Equinox Category: It focused on innovations in support processes, covering functions such as sales & marketing, corporate communications, supply chain, internal IT, HR, finance, legal, safety, and administration.
Conversational Bot: An AI-powered bot to assist employees with FAQs related to the Innovation Festival.
Innovation Impact Card: Detailed evaluation guidelines and qualification criteria for each category, along with an Innovation Impact Card for the Top 30 showcase projects.
Mentorship Programme: A new mentorship programme pairing teams with senior leaders and past winners to refine their ideas and enhance their impact.
Prolific Innovator Award: To honour individuals, who have consistently contributed innovative ideas for the past three consecutive years.
Innovation Festival Season 6 epitomises the growing innovation quotient at our group companies. With 80% more entries than the previous year, and the palpable energy of the RPGians showcasing the “Top 30” entries on the Founder’s Day, I felt that innovation quotient went up a few notches this year!”
Rajat Bhargava,
CEO – Speciality Sector, Head -
Group Transformation
The following projects stood out for their ingenuity, practical impact, and potential for scalability.
Winner: OptiTower
The team wanted to create a tower design software suite that helps in generating the most cost optimised tower within the given constraints in much less time. Optimised designs would improve chances of winning tenders, and a shorter tower design would improve execution and customer satisfaction.
Winner: Intell AI Mix: Optimising Mixing Lifecycle with Advanced AI
The transition from carbon to silica compounds as raw materials have extended mixing cycles causing capacity loss. This created a shortfall in tyre supply and plant delivery of 22,000 PCR and 5,400 TBR units. The team wanted to address the global demand for high-performance products.
Winner: AI Engineering Buddy, Your Companion for the New Era
The team wanted to address key challenges in software engineering practices like the complex environment comprising many technologies, time-consuming prototyping processes, lower test coverages and inconsistent testing practices, lack of talent and expertise, higher employee remunerations along with poor documentation and lack of central knowledge repository. Zensar’s AI Engineering Buddy is a one-stop solution to elevate engineering velocity for enterprises addressing complex engineering challenges.
Winner: Blizzard 2023 in Campus Metaverse
The team wanted to transform social interaction through technological advancements. They explored Metaverse to redefine it, and also used it as a branding tool for campus initiatives.
Winner: ‘Nap-Relief Trial’ World Largest Clinical Trial
The Indian market is dominated by Diclofenac. There was a need for a similar topical NSAID to be the presence of established topical analgesic products in the market. Now, Naprosyn is a textbook brand of RPGLS. To prove similar efficacy and safety, RPGLS conducted the world's largest clinical trial on Naproxen Sodium Gel. This innovation aims to expand the prescriber base for Naproxen in the topical market, providing healthcare professionals with evidence-based information to support their prescribing decisions.
Design and Manufacturing Innovation in Electrical Safety Gloves: IoT Factory Integration
The traditional safety glove design posed challenges in wearer satisfaction, ease of use, and overall performance. This caused a potential impact on customer satisfaction and production efficiency. The team introduced a novel design for safety gloves with features like FormFit Technology, EasyGlide Donning System and Defect Elimination Design.
Improve Quality of Green Leaf by Predicting Tea Plucking Interval
To improve the quality of green leaf, the HML team developed a system to predict the plucking interval by understanding the geological factors such as humidity, precipitation, soil temperature, leaf wetness, solar radiation, etc.
Introduction of Artificial Intelligence at Mixing Process
The team tried to tackle the issues in the rubber mixing process, especially the raw material quality that varies due to variation in source and season. Rubber mixing is a fixed process and the combination of a varying input results in output variation. The team proposed to use data science and principles of AI (controller) to achieve a consistent output.
Successfully launched seven business challenges. Many of these innovative ideas have been converted into projects with business impact estimated at 5 Cr.
Season 6 has set a new benchmark for excellence and its success reaffirms our belief that innovation is a continuous journey.
