Every year on Vishwakarma Puja, factories across India stop work. Machines are cleaned and garlanded, tools are laid out and worshipped, and for one day the shopfloor is treated as something sacred. I grew up with that day. My family are Luhars, ironsmiths, and Vishwakarma, the divine architect, is the patron of everyone who makes things.
I didn't become a blacksmith. I became an IT engineer, and in 2009 I co-founded a company to build ERP for manufacturers. It took me years to notice that I hadn't left the family trade as far behind as I thought.
Reading the metal
A good smith reads iron by its colour. Dull red, cherry, orange, yellow: each tells you what the metal will do under the hammer. Nobody writes that down. You learn it by standing next to the fire.
Factories work the same way. The real process is not the one on the wall chart. It lives in the supervisor who knows which machine runs hot after lunch, the storekeeper who keeps a second register "just in case", the operator who will never type into a screen with oily gloves on. Most ERP projects fail because they are designed for the wall chart.
What the shopfloor taught me
After more than 2,500 factory visits in 21 countries, a few rules have stuck:
- Start at the machine, not the ledger. If the data from the floor is late or wrong, every report built on it is fiction.
- Respect the operator's time. Every extra tap is a reason to skip the entry.
- The owner wants one number by evening. Find out which one, and make it true.
Why this site
I travel a lot for this work, and I see how news about trade, technology and geopolitics lands on real factories long before it shows up in quarterly results. This is where I'll write about it, along with the places those trips take me.
Welcome to the forge.