Operational costs were rising and Chinese textile exports threatened to saturate the market. Mantec helped to increase productivity and quality, which gave yearly savings of $1.1 Million.
Background
Established in 1973, the company is a major Indonesian textile manufacturer with a combined throughput of 3.3 million metres per month. Mantec was invited to help turn around the looming downturn threatened by massive increases in operational costs and market saturation due to the increased surplus of Chinese textile exports.
Mantec undertook an initial analysis, looking into the overall business; systemic, operational, and behavioural and identified potentially considerable improvements in the areas of productivity, quality and logistical efficiency.
Implementation
The project approach was primarily centred on increasing throughput and quality. This was achieved by fulfilling the installed capacity, reducing downtime, improving quality and reducing levels of rework. Major factors included fine-tuning support systems, from sales, planning, and purchasing to shipment.
The focus on support departments was centred on reinforcing departmental and interdepartmental communication. Comprehensive training of forecasting within marketing was also conducted. Tools for better control at the point of execution were installed. Manloading was also developed and installed, looking into the effective utilisation of labour resources per section and department. Planning accuracy, based on realistic material availability and production lead time, was improved.
Other key achievements
- strategic and operational goals were carefully broken down into sets of activities in such a way that everyone understood what they were responsible for;
- a control system was introduced to enable accurate forecasting, effective planning, proper and realistic allocation of resources, and timely and accurate feedback and reporting;
- behavioural profiles were transformed into measurable activities for specific accountability. This included development of effective supervisory behaviours; and
- a culture of continuous improvement was embedded, because instead of providing inflexible, rigid solutions, Mantec created, trained and reinforced teams geared towards continuous and sustainable quality improvements.
Results
Overall, results have surpassed original expectations, particularly as the teams trained by Mantec continue to find new and refine existing improvements. Most improvements have been generated through increased throughput and quality, measured by a newly developed productivity measurement scheme that relates output to production hours.
Additional monetary improvement
- eliminating 28.75% of set-up time; and
- reducing the coal-fired boiler overhaul time, thereby reducing the fuel consumption of oil boilers.
A total of US $1.1M US annualised savings was achieved. The project has already generated an equivalent of 388% ROI in its first year of implementation.
