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Case study in Apics Magazine A Viable Vision : Making profits a reality in a global recession |

Frequent expediting in production and logistics

Most chains operate with about 3 to 6 months inventory and a significant portion of inventory is non- moving. Free cash is an issue for most chains. If chains learn the science of managing their supply chain, they can at least double their current inventory turns.
With growing consumer awareness, companies in the Perishable Goods industry are finding it increasingly difficult to live with the problem of low freshness of stocks at the point of Sale. Companies in Food and Beverages sector are facing non negligible bottom-line erosion due to the need for discounting to get rid of near-expiry stocks as well as write-offs of expired stocks.
Though the over all population distribution may follow the normal distribution curve for variation in sizes, the sales of a particular retail shop do not necessarily obey that distribution! Reality tells us that at a shop and at a day to day level the arrival can be very erratic. The fluctuations at a shop level much more than what is seen at a large population level.
Now imagine the plight of those companies whose sales are dominated by wholesalers. I know of one such FMCG company who sells only 20% directly into retail and 80% through wholesale. They do as much as 60% of the entire month’s sales on the last day of the month!
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Client: Fleetguard Filters The After Market distribution now operates at 17 inventory turns, as compared to 3 to 4 average turns of industry, with over 98% availability at all stocking points, including distributors. The distributors have this availability at 10-12 days inventory. |
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Client: Liberty Shoes The company has achieved over 95% availability in its central warehouse. The production lead time has dropped from 45 days to 25 days with 30% reduction in WIP and FG inventory. |
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Client: Top1 Lubricants TOP1 reduced its inventory from 7 months to 2 months in its warehouses in Indonesia, while improving availability to near 100%. |
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Client: JK Files and Tools Within 2 months of start of TOC journey, the lead time was reduced by 40%. Plant output has gone up by35%, across 5 locations. One of the plants has shown an increase of over 70%. |
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Client: Filtrum Polymer When the TOC implementation started in Oct 2009, the company was at 6% PBT. Now the company is at 15%PBT with 60% increase in sales. It has 100% delivery performance to all its auto parts customers |

Month end skew of dispatches Pressure to reduce manufacturing costs




How does one optimize in an environment of changing product mix coupled with variability in resource loading, while at the same time, maximize plant output along with delivery performance? Looks like a hopeless situation for a plant manager but an exciting problem for a theoretician and hence a great market for an IT product.
The only performance which can make a perceptual difference to a customer is when a supplier has on-time delivery performance of near 100% as per originally committed date to the consumer...
Plant managers are torn between the chronic conflict of pushing specific orders in full out of the plant versus taking actions to maximize plant output. If in a time period, they get the best output, the immediate next is followed in much reduced output as order completion takes the front seat. The conflict manifests itself in various inter-departmental meetings...
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Client: Godrej Security Solutions The physical securities division has achieved on time performance of more than 90%, while reducing lead time by 43% and increase in plant output by more than 50%.... |
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Client: Godrej Interio The Office Furniture Division (OPOS) of Godrej Interio achieves on-time delivery of 98%+, on the original committed customer dates, with capacity release of 30%. |
Client: A Leading Switchgear manufacturer Record Production Levels month on month from the third month, achieved more than 50% rise in plant output |
Client: Tool and die cast die manufacturer Die Cast Dies and Panel Tools manufacturing major increases on time delivery from below 8% to more than 90%, while reducing lead time by 25%. |










One of the biggest problems impacting the engineering industry, in India, is retention of experienced engineers in the design department. Organizations are dealing with the situation by forcing the designers to stretch beyond the official working hours which in turn is causing burnout of designers.
The fact that a person was late as per planned duration does not necessarily mean that he was inefficient. At same time a resource completing work on planned time does not necessarily mean that he is efficient.Managers are intuitively aware about these biases in decisions. So in many cases, they rely more on their experience about resources to rate them rather than just relying on the numbers.
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Client: Tata Bluescope Steel With implementation of flow principles of CCPM, the lead-time of projects has reduced by 25%, with 15% more output from manufacturing facility and 30% more output from engineering resources. |
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Client: TRF The bulk material handling systems division delivered 30% more output as compared to last year, from existing resources. The design lead time has come down to 3 months from an average of 8 months... |
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Client: Tata Metaliks Tata Metaliks sets an industry benchmark in executing Blast Furnace relining shut down using CCPM. The shut down was completed in record 23 days (as compared to typical 40 to 50 day)... |
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Client: Abhishek industries Using CCPM, Abhishek Industries (Trident Group) erects spinning plant of 30,000 spindles, a green field project, in record time of 9 months as compared to industry benchmark of 12 months... |