Equipment Manufacturing

Consulting Services for Equipment Manufacturing Companies

An equipment manufacturing or custom manufacturing company’s ability to grow its sales and profits consistently is limited by constraints in the following areas:

Operations

Being part of a cyclical industry, means that typically, most equipment manufacturing companies go through periods of ‘flood’ and ‘famine’. During a flood (when the market is booming and backlog of orders goes up significantly), companies experience the ‘constraint’ in operations. Expediting orders to ensure timely delivery and the perennial struggle for matching components on the shop floor lead to significant wastage of capacity and month end skew in equipment production. These prevent a company from exploiting its operational assets to its full potential.

Vector offers consulting services to help equipment manufacturing companies reduce lead time of delivery, improve delivery reliability and increase plant output. Find out how

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Our Offer

  • Increase in on-time delivery performance to more than 95% as per the originally committed dates
  • Reduction in overall lead time (and work in progress) by around 30% to 50%
  • Increase in output of equipment manufacturing plants by around 25-40%
  • Reduction in overall equipment inventory by 10-20%
  • Drastic reduction of expediting costs like overtime and emergency freights
  • Improvement in cash-to-cash cycle

Sales Bandwidth

During periods of underload on equipment manufacturing plants, the pressure on operations teams dips while the pressure on the sales teams (to procure orders) increases. Sales teams are often unable to respond fittingly to the challenge as they lack the bandwidth to expand their efforts in the market. The sales teams’ energies, which ideally should be used to develop customers are mostly consumed by transactional activities associated with existing customer orders.

With the help of Vector’s consulting services, equipment manufacturing or custom manufacturing companies can increase bandwidth and improve effectiveness of their sales teams.

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Our Offer

  • Release more than 50% of capacity of sales team
  • Increase rate of acquisition of new customers
  • Maximize sale rate from existing customer base
  • Increase overall enquiry base

Spares and Services

One of the ways equipment manufacturing companies can expand market share in many equipment categories is by improving availability of spares for equipment under breakdown and rapid resolution of service issues. This is because equipment uptime is critical for customers. However, ensuring availability of equipment spares for service is a major challenge for companies considering the enormous variety of parts involved. To complicate things further, some of the equipment parts are in frequent demand while others, often called “stranger” parts, are needed infrequently. Consequently, when companies try to improve sales and service, they suffer the downside of cash being tied up in slow-moving inventory.

Vector offers consulting services to equipment manufacturing companies to help them manage spare parts availability without increasing inventory:

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Our Offer

  • Enhance availability of equipment spares at the point of service to near ~100% on a daily basis
  • Reduction in inventory in the overall supply chain by around 25%
  • Reduction in as much as 50% in turn-around-time (TAT) of equipment maintenance at service centers
  • Increase on-time performance of equipment service to more than 90%
  • Increase sales of equipment spares by more than 20%

New Product Development

Creating new equipment and new variants of equipment is challenging for the new product development departments of equipment manufacturing companies. In addition to the fact that R&D is inherently uncertain, enormous workload and heavy dependence on external suppliers make the task more difficult. Added to this is the complexity of being forced to multitask across the initial stages of projects and the emergent residual work on equipment variants for which customer orders have been secured. Consequently, equipment manufacturing companies have to routinely contend with rework, delays in product stabilization, delays in launch of new equipment and post launch quality complaints.

Vector offers equipment companies or other custom manufacturing companies consulting and implementation services which can stabilize operations in R&D units and increase the companies’ output and reliability.

Know more about how Vector’s consulting services can enable equipment manufacturing companies to tackle the problems of chronic delays and poor output in new product development.

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Our Offer

  • Reduce project lead time by 33- 50%
  • Increase Output by 30-50% from existing resource base
  • Reduce rework during equipment development
  • Improve quality of equipment
  • Stabilize rapid mass production of new equipment
  • Reduce stress on people and other resources

Case Studies

Discover how Vector’s consulting services enabled organizations like Kirloskar Oil Engine, Godrej & Boyce and many others to transform their operations using “pull” systems of Theory of Constraints and secure for themselves a competitive advantage in their markets.

  • Enabling assured one-week delivery at Kirloskar Oil Engines Ltd

    Indicators Remark
    Order to Dispatch Reduced from 35-45 days to 7 days
    Daily Availability of engines Increased to 99%
    Credit Policy Reduced by 95%
    Debtors Reduced by 96%
    RM Inventories Reduced by 18%
    Net Cash Improved from cash- negative to cash-rich

    After having made the shift from the forecast-based model to consumption-based operations, KOEL can now offer guaranteed deliveries in ONE WEEK (industry standard is four-six weeks). In addition to improved efficiency, the company also enjoys several financial and operational benefits, all thanks to this shift in approach.

  • Aligning delivery with dynamic site conditions - Godrej Material Handling Equipment

    Indicators Remark
    On-Time Performance Improved to 85%
    WIP (days) Reduced by 33%
    Output (Export Line) Increased by 54%
    Output (Domestic Line) Increased by 24%
    FG (count) Reduced by 75%
    RM Availability Improved to 97%
    RM Inventory (in Days) Reduced 44%

    With the help of Vector Consulting Group, GODREJ-Material Handling Equipment, India's largest lift truck manufacturer, significantly improved several parameters including output and on-time performance.

  • Increasing output of New Product Development - Kirloskar Oil Engines Ltd

    Indicators Remark
    NPD contribution to sales Near 20% (up from 4%)
    Short-Term projects 63% faster
    Long-term Projects 56% faster
    New parts developed Increased 75%
    CRE Engine drawings Increased 68%
    AE Industrial drawings Increased 88%

    KOEL focused on facilitating flow of projects in the new product development funnel using the principles of Theory of Constraints. This enabled the company to shorten project lead time by more than 50%!

More Case Studies

Clients

We have partnered with major names in the equipment manufacturing industry to create and implement radical solutions which have redefined industry benchmarks. These names include:

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Dara Byramjee

Executive Vice President & Business-Head, Godrej Security Solutions

With three times more output from the same capacity and reduced working capital requirement, we were able to improve our ROCE by three times.

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