A stain­less steel man­u­fac­tur­er increased its over­all month­ly pro­duc­tion by 16% in less than 6 months

Key results

About the client 

Our client is one of Indi­a’s lead­ing pro­duc­ers and sup­pli­ers of stainless-steel long prod­ucts such as round bars, con­tin­u­ous cast billets/blooms, thread­ed bars, bright bars, and forged bars. It is also one of the most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced stainless-steel man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies in India and has a glob­al presence.

The chal­lenge

The client want­ed a more appro­pri­ate organ­i­sa­tion­al design for its plants. We were brought in to help them achieve two objectives: 

• To revamp the organ­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture of the bright bar pro­cess­ing unit, as well as two man­u­fac­tur­ing units 
• To improve through­put at the bright bar pro­cess­ing unit by installing man­age­ment con­trol sys­tems (MCS) that han­dled pro­duc­tion, plan­ning and maintenance 

What we did

The project was bro­ken down into two work­streams, with each team made up of employ­ees from the client com­pa­ny, senior plant man­age­ment, and Reynard experts. 

Work­stream 1: Organ­i­sa­tion design and restruc­tur­ing — all tar­get plants 

Focus: Inte­grate organ­i­sa­tion struc­tures, process­es, and peo­ple 

• Eval­u­at­ed over 1,000 posi­tions involved in the man­u­fac­tur­ing process of the var­i­ous products. 
• Car­ried out detailed obser­va­tions of the activ­i­ties under­tak­en by shift work­ers to deter­mine the most appro­pri­ate organ­i­sa­tion struc­ture required to per­form these activities. 
• Con­duct­ed inter­views and com­plet­ed obser­va­tion stud­ies of the man­age­r­i­al lay­er to under­stand the activ­i­ties and process­es under­tak­en to iden­ti­fy and imple­ment improvements. 
• Deter­mined the cor­rect organ­i­sa­tion struc­ture, with effi­cient spans of con­trol, for the dif­fer­ent pro­duc­tion areas. 

Work­stream 2: Through­put improve­ment — bright bar pro­cess­ing unit 

Focus: Improve the plan­t’s pro­duc­tion, main­te­nance, and plan­ning sys­tems 

• Iden­ti­fied gaps in the pro­duc­tion, main­te­nance, qual­i­ty and plan­ning processes. 
• Ini­ti­at­ed stan­dards for plan­ning and per­for­mance mon­i­tor­ing of machines. 
• Set up a for­mal struc­ture for month­ly, week­ly and dai­ly planning. 
• Set up month­ly pro­duc­tion plan­ning process­es based on pend­ing orders, works in progress (WIP), and raw mate­r­i­al (RM) avail­abil­i­ty. RM and WIP was also seg­re­gat­ed at the tar­get plants based on shape, size, process stage and so on. 
• Intro­duced an MCS to improve the qual­i­ty of incom­ing black mate­r­i­al from the man­u­fac­tur­ing units — a prob­lem that was also affect­ing pro­duc­tion in the bright bar pro­cess­ing unit. 
• Designed and imple­ment­ed an effec­tive man­age­ment sys­tem that empha­sised short inter­val controls.

Results

Besides the key results that were obtained after the pro­jec­t’s imple­men­ta­tion, the client could final­ly address the inef­fi­cien­cy gaps in the process and man­age­ment sys­tems sustainably. 

As a result, the tar­get plants achieved their high­est ever month­ly pro­duc­tion num­bers on two sep­a­rate occa­sions dur­ing the 22-week timeframe.