Over the last decade, Syrma Technology has evolved into a company focused on niche, knowledge-intensive products for clients ranging from startups to well-established global organisations. The company can design and build a wide range of products with a focus on three areas—co-creation (from concept to complete build), product realisation (from prototypes to complete serial builds), and life cycle management (optimisation of existing products for state-of-art reliability, quality and cost).
By Ruchira Prasad
Syrma Technology was set up in 2005 at the Madras Export Processing Zone in Chennai. It is part of the Tandon Group, which has been in the electronics manufacturing industry for more than three decades. Once the Group sold off its company, Celetronix, to Jabil India, it was looking to leverage its experience and expertise to enter niche segments in electronics manufacturing. Thus, Syrma Technology came about to cater to high-mix, low-to-medium volume products.
Manufacturing floor, at a glance
Syrma Technology sees itself as a specialised electronics manufacturing services company, developing box-and-board builds for a wide range of industries such as healthcare, industrial, automotive, defence, aerospace, vision systems, and home and industrial automation. Syrma specialises in making RFID tags, RFID readers, magnetic coils and transformers (high frequency), PCB assemblies, memory modules and GSM antennas.
Since it manufactures a very wide range of products, it is difficult to clearly define a capacity. Every year, the company delivers over 75 million RFID tags, 6-7 million magnetic coils and transformers, approximately 4 million PCB assembled boards, and has the capacity to assemble more than 400,000 GSM antennas. In order to keep pace with its aggressive growth plans, Syrma Technology is also doubling, and in some cases quadrupling, its capacity.
Focusing on quality
Syrma Technology strives to deliver products that are knowledge-intensive and cutting-edge in terms of design and engineering. The Syrma Technology team meets all of the highest quality assurance specifications in the industry, such as IPC 610 Class 3 (Class 2 standard) and ANSI /NCSL Z540-1. Additionally, its manufacturing systems comply with broader ISO 14001, 9001, and 13485 manufacturing standards. Apart from ISO compliance, Syrma Technology also has certifications which are specific to the industries it caters to. These include TS 16949 for the automotive industry and TL 9000 for the telecom field.
Its manufacturing plant in Chennai, India, is compliant with lead-free RoHS standards for restricting hazard substances and materials. Its facility also conforms to strict standards set forth by Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) and Conflict Minerals guidelines.
Initiatives for ‘Making in India’
Syrma Technology has made significant efforts and investments in the manufacturing industry in India for over 30 years. This is right from building a world-class manufacturing facility in Chennai, to creating a highly competitive local supply chain to cut manufacturing costs, accelerate time-to-market, and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers by helping local suppliers grow their businesses instead. The company employs over 1,000 workers at its main manufacturing facility in Chennai. It has also made investments in India’s workforce through initiatives like training programmes for women.
CEO Sreeram Srinivasan says, “The benefits of ‘Make in India’ will become clearer as it evolves and after seeing how comprehensively it addresses industry challenges, which include the high cost of capital, policy barriers and tariff blind spots, and procedural complexities. We should continue to petition the government to clear blind spots in policies. There is an urgent requirement to re-train policy implementation personnel so that they better support this initiative and enable it to reach its full potential. It is important that we focus on doing the things we do best every day, in terms of quality, delivery and innovation.”
The future
Syrma Technology plans to invest in expanding its capacities by acquiring space in electronics clusters in the domestic tariff area. This will help it to establish a market presence, while also showcasing its strengths. Second, Syrma is adding to its field strength to acquire more customers. Finally, the company is strengthening its design and engineering talent pool to expand its portfolio and become the supplier of choice for a wide range of customers.
- Syrma Technology is continually investing in upgrading and maintaining its state-of-art facilities.
- It is also planning to add a significant amount of CAPEX within the next several years for driving further business growth.
- It will continue to invest in balancing equipment, productivity enhancing equipment, additional capacity in bottleneck areas, and creating testing facilities.
Our leadership team strongly believes that the high quality of inputs is key to delivering reliable products, which is why we have developed and nurtured a very dedicated supplier base, and a stringent internal quality and traceability system.
Sreeram Srinivasan, CEO at Syrma Technology
