About Us....

In its pursuance for Competitiveness in Indian Industry, The Confederation of Indian Industry established CII – L M Thapar Centre for Competitiveness in 2004 at Chandigarh with a vision of providing the Indian SMEs a one stop shop for all their needs pertaining to competitiveness.

Business worldwide is focusing today on sharpening strategies, reducing costs, improving quality and increasing production. This becomes more important for Small and Medium Enterprises, which have low shock absorption capacity. SMEs form the bottom of the pyramid of Indian Economy, which comprises of more than 17 million such units. This sector also contributes to nearly 40% of the total industrial output.

To realize its vision, the CII – L M Thapar Centre for Competitiveness, Chandigarh has been working for providing consultancy to SMEs for various components of competitiveness like Energy Management, Quality Management, Cost Management, and Human Resource Management. Though the centre provides services to Individual companies also, the basic approach has been to form a cluster of SME’s and then helping them grow together with a “learning through sharing” attitude. The clusters could be sectoral, locational or OEM-vendor. The cluster approach aims at improving competitiveness in an associated group rather than in discreet companies. The approach takes the momentum of group-dynamics and deluge of multiplicity of ideas as an added advantage to succeed in the mission.

The centre has so far successfully completed 64 such clusters  impacting 524 Companies across sectors and all over the country. Presently there are 24 Clusters are ongoing with 733 Companies  at Jallandhar, Ludhiana, Faridabad, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Vadodara, Pune, Nashik, Kolhapur & Jamshedpur
Other upcoming clusters are Ahmedabad, Ahmednagar, Aurangabad, Ludhiana, Baramati.
Apart from direct services the centre is also engaged in improving awareness and upgrading knowledge in the industry through organizing Seminars, Conferences and Training Programmes on contemporary issues and needs of the Indian Industry.