The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) hosted a seminar titled “Impacting Manufacturing Competitiveness Through Smart Manufacturing” on Monday, July 7, 2025.

The seminar featured a discussion between Haresh Malkani, Chief Technology Officer, CESMII and Prerna Prabhakar, Associate Fellow, CSEP.

About the event

Over the last 15 years, Smart Manufacturing (SM) initiatives have gained great momentum in both developed and developing nations across the world. Measurable, substantial impact on productivity, quality and energy consumption has been demonstrated across multiple industry sectors, for manufacturers of all sizes, leading the way for manufacturers to become more competitive globally. As a result, SM is now a strategic initiative with a growing number of manufacturers, including their supply chains, and is being integrated into national priorities, resulting in exponentially growing levels of public and private investments in this field. However, broad adoption by MSMEs and cost-effective scaling among larger manufacturers still faces some challenges including culture, workforce, standards and implementation costs. This conversation brought out learnings from a US-based Smart Manufacturing Institute and explore possibilities of SM adoption by Indian firms.

About CESMII

CESMII – The Smart Manufacturing Institute – is a US DOE sponsored public-private institute focused on dramatically improving manufacturing performance and energy productivity through accelerated adoption of Smart Manufacturing technologies and education. CESMII’s technical focus is integration of advanced sensors, data analytics, predictive modeling (including machine learning and AI), advanced process control and platform interoperability technologies into Smart Manufacturing solutions that impact quality, productivity and energy. CESMII has also created a standards-based, vendor agnostic interoperability platform specification that reduces the cost and complexity of implementing SM solutions by 50%. Through a diverse portfolio of nearly 60 collaborative projects, CESMII has developed and demonstrated SM solutions in more than 15 industry verticals for continuous and discrete operations, and for manufacturers of all sizes, yielding 8-15% improvement in productivity and energy consumption.  CESMII’s workforce development program is focused on creating education content for the talent pipeline as well as upskilling of the incumbent workforce, training roughly 2000 personnel annually.

Speaker

Haresh Malkani

Haresh Malkani was appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII) in March of 2018. In his role as CTO for CESMII, Haresh oversees the technology mission, road map and objectives of CESMII. He will spearhead development of technologies spanning advanced sensors, controls, platforms, data analytics, modeling for manufacturing, and smart manufacturing standards and protocols. He will oversee the development and application of the nation’s first open, collaborative Smart Manufacturing technology platform for industrial applications. In addition, he will provide guidance on the institute’s technical program content for training and workforce development.

Haresh brings over 29 years of experience in an industrial RD&E environment covering development and deployment of Smart Manufacturing technologies including sensing, automation, control, modelling, simulation and analytics for applications in continuous, hybrid and discrete manufacturing operations. Haresh comes to CESMII from a successful career at Alcoa/Arconic. He most recently was Director, Digital Manufacturing & Automation Technologies. In this role Haresh was responsible for developing the strategy for Smart Manufacturing and deploying solutions that drove productivity in excess of $40M/year. His expertise in modeling, simulation, advanced sensing, automation, analytics and visualization were key to developing the technical strategy, architecture and approach. Haresh has a successful history of projects developing model-based control for several unit operations at Alcoa.

In addition, Haresh has been involved with the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC) for over 8 years.  He most recently held the position of Vice Chairman of SMLC. Haresh holds a Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University and a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the Maharaja Sayajirao University (India).

Moderator

Prerna Prabhakar

Prerna Prabhakar is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP). Prerna’s research primarily focuses on trade and industrial policies, and competitiveness. Prior to joining CSEP, she worked with the Council on Energy Environment and Water (CEEW) where she focused on understanding the linkages between sustainability and international trade.  Prerna has also worked with the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) on external sector issues, investment potential for Indian States/Union Territories as well as land policy matters. She has also worked on research projects with the University of Delhi, South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE), Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) and Centre for WTO Studies at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT).

She has completed her PhD from the Department of Business Economics, University of Delhi. She has a postgraduate degree in Economics from TERI School of Advanced Studies (TSAS). She has published her research in Indian and international journals including Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. She regularly contributes opinion pieces to leading newspapers.

Welcome Address

Nancy Gupta

Nancy Gupta is a Research Associate in the Growth Finance and Development vertical at CSEP. She holds a post-graduate degree in Economics. Prior to joining CSEP, Nancy held positions at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) and the Centre for WTO Studies. During her tenure, she focused on fisheries subsidies, household and public finance, municipal bonds, and Indian passenger rail reform.

All content reflects the individual views of the speakers. The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) does not hold an institutional view on any subject.

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for general queries and Ayesha Manocha at AManocha@csep.org for media queries.