Customer Profile: A very popular manufacturer of tobacco products with a large operation
Problem: The tobacco industry being highly regulated, had a system where the government charged duties on the machines used for production and not on the products produced. This meant that the client had to operate the machine at a high level of availability in order to reduce the cost of production. There were frequent breakdowns of the machine leading to reduction of machine availability leading to losses.
Solution: We undertook an exercise where the breakdowns were logged and the reasons for the breakdown were identified for each breakdown. We did a Pareto analysis and identified the top three reasons for breakdown. Improvement actions were implemented on these top 3 reasons leading to drastic reductions in breakdown time.
Benefit: The exercise led to a drastic change in the breakdown percentage from 11% to 4% and this 7% reduction in breakdown time when extrapolated to the amount of production increase achieved, amounted to a benefit of Rs. 2 Cr. per annum.
Increasing Factory Throughput