In today’s highly competitive and dynamic environment, market competition forces organizations to improve productivity and enhance their competiveness. Consequently, the matter of assessing and improving competitiveness in different industry of several countries has received increased attention in recent times.
In addition, it has been observed that engineering industries need to focus and invest more on operational improvement and optimization. Value adders/ operators play a key role in operations in spite of the application of machinery and equipment. As per challenges raised by the industry, few listed are low productivity, over staffing, poor labor relations, inefficient handling of operator challenges, high wages an d lack of trained or skilled workforce. It can be inferred that all these issues are fallouts of lower manpower productivities and scientific approach towards efficiency improvement is the need of the hour.
Owing to these factors every year, companies and contractors are hit with crores of rupees in engineering sector due to inefficiency factors impacting business. A decline in productivity means an increase in costs and therefore deterioration in the competitive position of an organization. On the other hand, an improvement in productivity can lead to a decrease in cost and duration of production, an improvement in quality, and therefore a growth in the market share.
Team Faber is supporting a leading organization from engineering domain situated in South Gujarat. The client is a global leader in the textile industry equipment manufacturing. The journey was initiated to improve productivity and throughput by deploying different operational excellence tools to deliver exceptional results. The benefits delivered have been phenomenal and well received by the client. The crucial challenges that required sharp focus on productivity improvement for the organization include:
- Inability of assembly line to meet increased market demand
- Rising issues of product quality
- Issues related to Work station design
- Lack of standard operating procedure in place
- Unbalanced operations creating Muda, Mura, Muri etc
The improvement in productivity was conducted via following key drivers:
- Conducting a detailed Value Stream Mapping Exercise (Current State Map and Future State Map) to study all the steps, identify all wastes (Muda, Mura and Muri) in the process and devise solutions to eliminate them
- Defining standard times (fair days work) by conducting time and motion study for the ongoing process
- Considering all the factors such as environmental conditions, difficulties encountered, nature of task, as per ILO standards
Apply operational excellence concepts/ tools such as line balancing, change over time reduction (SMED), and Five S, etc to eliminate waste - Work station redesign exercise was extremely fruitful and well received to arrive more ergonomic workplace (and replace traditional work benches) to eliminate operator fatigue and improve productivity
The exercise has helped client organization:
- Improve productivity from 24 spindles per shift to 64 spindles per shift
- Work content improved by 61%
- Overall Productivity improved by 167%
- Total 10 newly designed work station layout as per ergonomic design
This exercise helped to improve the production techniques, increase labor productivity, and efficiency improvement, all of which resulted in cost and wastage reduction – building more competitiveness.
These fundamental concepts like Value Stream Mapping and Time and Motion study facilitates to arrive at better capacity realization and robust planning system. The success stories and case studies are plenty, and it is here to stay for long. These concepts are answers for building competitiveness for Organizations and overall industry!
Written By: Faber Mayuri Pandya and Faber Devna Chaturvedi
