Team Faber Infinite is always passionate about crafting culture that supports transformation and innovation. Fabers strongly live by its values and believe in delivering maximum returns to its client. The team focuses on the people as catalysts for the improvement journey. Having similar thoughts and aligning its vision with Make in India initiatives, it strives to develop fast-track growth trajectory by bringing improvement in manufacturing sector. The Indian engineering industry has been witnessing a huge upsurge and remarkable growth over the last few years driven by increased investments in infrastructure and industrial production.
The manufacturing industry is the backbone of the Indian economy and is emerging with a thriving spirit. However, there are certain challenges as well, which the manufacturing sector has been facing pre-dominantly. Industry is constantly trying to find ways to lower production costs in order to maintain or maximize profit margins to stay relevant. This goal becomes more difficult in today’s environment of fluctuating raw material costs, variable market prices, rising energy and transportation costs, and reduced consumer discretionary spending. Growing competition from emerging countries, condensed product lifecycles, an increase in the number of product configurations, and complicated supply chains all add to the complexity. Mastering these challenges means making improvements to operations, efficiencies and overall effectiveness.
With such hyper competitive market environment, the competition is getting intense. Increasingly organisations from all sectors and all sizes are looking at operational excellence (OE)/ world class manufacturing (WCM) practices to eliminate inefficiencies across their value chains which ultimately helps them to drive costs down and deliver quality goods and services to customers.
By implementing various drivers like Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and Material Velocity Improvement, it can prove to do wonders in terms of maximizing efficiencies and effectiveness through the optimization of material flow, equipment availability, performances and product quality.
While delivering at one of the leading textile machine manufacturers in India, Faber Infinite created a breakthrough in building competitiveness and leveraging the hidden potential of the organization. Let us look at the robust operational excellence and world class management practices that Faber deployed at the client site for delivering phenomenal results:
Improved Equipment Maintenance Practices:
By implementing pillars like Autonomous and Planned Maintenance from the house of TPM at client place, an enormous amount of hidden capacity was released for heavy equipment in the workshop by improved equipment maintenance practices. This helped in saving excess hours of machine utilization, which lead to savings of manpower cost up to INR 7 Million ~ 70 lacs.
Line Balancing & Lean Layout:
Eliminating the non-value adding factors from the workplace contributes in driving higher productivity. The weakest link of the entire assembly process is directly proportional to the unit absorbing maximum time. This ultimately becomes the bottleneck of the process affecting the entire chain. To reduce this combination of activities including elimination of unnecessary activities, combining different activities together, rearranging, de-bottlenecking and improving material flow proved to be a catalyst in raising the productivity with existing set of resources, also reducing the throughput time.
Tremendous hidden capacity at the two assembly lines was released, which could add to the topline growth of the organization by almost INR 100 crores (~10 Million). The percentage improvement achieved is quite evident, since the number of spindles produced per day increased from 42 to 90 units and client achieved an evident rise of more than 117% in productivity.
Lean Layout designing incorporated the removal of existing waste/ inefficiencies from the workplace. Waste in manufacturing is usually not about the scrap material that gets thrown away or recycled, but the most important part, which is often ignored includes all the process wastes that waste your time and resources. Working on these activities resulted in substantial improvement the productivity of client system and material velocity.
Team Faber Infinite stands by its core belief to under commit and over perform. Since the inception Team Faber Infinite has been providing huge return on investment by maximizing the returns for its clients. The scope of progress in terms of cost and productivity improvement is tremendous and can be further enhanced by sustaining the existing methodology. By deploying appropriate standards for inventory management, taking appropriate countermeasures to prevent waste generation and implementation of plant standards, overall manufacturing standards, quality and performance can be improved.
Written By: Faber Devna Chaturvedi