International Tractors Limited

International Tractors Limited, India’s largest integrated tractor manufacturer and No. 1 exporter, offers a huge range of tractors from 18 horsepower up to 120 horsepower under the brand name Sonalika. It also offers customized solutions and exports tractors to over 120 countries.

Like most OEMs, Sonalika faced chronic unavailability issues – poor fill kit coverage for manufacturing and the consequent problems of expediting and rescheduling, both at vendors’ units and its own assembly lines. Many OEMS tend to resort to pushing their component inventory related inefficiencies to the RM vendors, and out-of-turn excess production to dealers. Contrary to this practice, Sonalika chose to forge win-win partnerships in its supply chain.

After moving away from a forecast-based model to an end-to-end pull replenishment based model, which includes production and supplies from vendors, assembly of tractors in Sonalika plant and distribution to their warehouse, Sonalika now ensures near-perfect availability of components and tractors while also reducing inventory at all levels and entities in the value chain. Consequently, they enabled increase in manufacturing productivity to 99% and reduced manufacturing lead-time to a single day!