Textile Company

The situation on arrival

The company had existed for five years and had been losing money in every one of them. The market was there. The men and machines were there. Almost everything else was wrong: no standardised operations, extremely heavy rejections, persistent quality issues, breakdowns, horrendous inventory, and inconsistency in every area including decision making.

Sanjeev was invited in to study the issues and help turn the company around.

What we did on the floor

The work applied lean thinking, aided by lean techniques, to build something the company had never had: the steps of a lean operating system, with an MIS, checklists and reviews to hold it in place. Pushing theory can shut some minds, but demonstrating and handheld working through a change has a better chance of duplication.

Tools neither build nor change culture. Habits do. Habits are formed by what we do and how. So by helping them practice a different routine and feel proud of the changed results, motivated the people to do more. Hundreds of problems were identified and solutions found and implemented. The improvement measured was uplifting and motivating for them to continue.

What changed

The company became operationally profitable in the eighth month.

It has since moved on to revenues of a few billion rupees, and is now planning additional lines of machinery for increased capacity and demand.

The turnaround was not a cost-cutting exercise. The same market, the same machines, and largely the same people produced a profitable company once the way of thinking and executing changed to lean thinking ways.