Cutting Room Reengineering
The Client
The client is one of the largest garment exporting groups in Sri Lanka
with total 7 factories. The concerned factory had been producing and
exporting over 2 million pieces of garments to USA. The company had
excellent infrastructure and skilled manpower.
The Challenge
Though the company had highly skilled manpower and automated spreading
and cutting equipment, the overall productivity of cutting department
was quite low. Low utilization of manpower and CAM contributed maximum
to this. In addition there were supply and quality issues from other
supplier departments like pattern making and fabric stores that added
to excessive non value-added work. The challenge lied in sensitizing
the senior and middle managers for adopting new ways of carrying out
their processes in order to improve their productivity.
The Solution
The RBC team started with an on floor assessment and critical analysis
of the processes and procedures being followed with the factory
management team.
Data for peak, low and normal workload was analyzed and work standards for cutting procedures were established/revised.
Opportunity areas for improving the cutting department efficiency were identified.
The client’s team was trained intensively in the concepts of
proactive cut planning, cutting work content calculation, fusing
efficiency, tackling width variations, CAM utilization, documenting
& monitoring idle time and elimination of repetitive quality checks.
The existing procedures of cutting department were reengineered.
In addIn addition, improvement projects were identified in each
sub-area of cutting which will be regularly monitored by the Senior
Management of the company.
Key Results
The Company was able to improve cutting department’s labour
productivity by 18% within a period of 8 weeks. Within 6 months the
company was expected to improve its cutting department’s labour
productivity by 52%.
Business Impact
As a result of the project the factory has achieved substantial
financial benefits. With 18% improvement in the cutting room
productivity the company was expected to save US$ 45000 per annum. In
future, with completion of identified improvement projects the company
is expected to take its savings to US$ 100,000 per year.
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