“Lean Manufacturing keeps you in profit no matter what the economic scenario is.”
– Harish Chatterjee, VP- Manufacturing
The textile industry is heading towards a crag of Environmental and Social imbalances in the near future. Seeing it coming, Raymond will sustain to be on top of the textile ladder by adapting with the changing dynamics of the textile industry. Raymond Limited has always focused on being sustainable and runs efficient plants both in terms of productivity and energy conservation.
Raymond, is a market leader in Worsted fabrics with three manufacturing units in Jalgaon, Chindwara and Vapi. In the last few years there have been many tough challenges in terms of adapting to recession and globalization. The period also saw an increase in prices of raw materials and abridging product life cycles, more rapid changeovers and technology preferment. All these circumstances evolve the necessity of building or implementing the latest manufacturing strategies for sustainability in market.
A Textile Industry’s aim is to not only produce fabric with the best quality but also to run a balanced plant. We observed a growing number of proximate customers and other manufacturing plants operating under the lean principles. We studied the feasibility of lean principles in textile plant and performed up to a SKU- level analysis. Raymond’s manufacturing plants are vertically integrated and is famously known as “From a Sheep’s back to the Man’s back”. In this process of manufacturing we cannot afford to produce a deficient product and this fueled the implementation of Lean principles at Raymond trying to create value through quality and customer satisfaction.
In the process of improving the manufacturing process in a comprehensive way, our first target was to improve the flow of material within the plant. We knew numbers were always legitimate so we went on to re define our assumptions about each manufacturing cell and steered the flow of product through TOC, a method which focuses on building throughput and shrink operating expenses of the plant. Implementation of TOC, brought down the Lead times drastically. Our work in process condensed on a steady scale optimizing our plant productivity.
We developed new metrics to track our daily waste percentage and made a Pareto Analysis- a lean manufacturing technique based on the concept that how 80 percent of waste is caused by 20 percent of causes. Several root cause analysis were performed to bring out the possibilities of waste generating areas within the plant. Lean manufacturing and textile is about producing the right product in the right time. We developed a Kanban process, a card system to maneuver the material across the plant and our warehouse follows a state of the art system with lean concepts. Heijunka, a production levelling theory was implemented to eliminate wastage of time and this demonstrated a huge rise in the no. of warehouse pickups per day.
Raymond’s Lean Success story has been due to striving focus and greater awareness among employees towards Lean Manufacturing. It’s about the goal of every project you take up. Once Raymond picks up a customer order it follows through all the lean concepts to avoid wastage and flows through the pipeline as per the lead times. Every year we redefine our benchmark and set higher standards in quality and productivity.
In this process every employee is accountable and implementation of lean has to be done to the root level.
For a textile industry
“Quality is a never ending voyage and Lean Manufacturing strategies must become a part of your daily system”.
