ACHIEVERS

Modernizing Medical Plastics Injection Moulding in India

MPDS : Has your Planning department decided on changes in production planning?

SD : The planning department at Milacron had to make few changes in schedule. It was not only the Milacron production schedule to be taken into consideration. It was the vendor’s production schedule as well. Milacron has a big vendor base who makes sure that we produce 3,000+ machines every year, with consistent quality and in record times. All this happens like clockwork. Any change in delivery of a small part, causes disruption in the entire machine delivery timelines. Our planning department was quick enough to account for these changes and make sure that the production schedule stays on track without much disruption.

MPDS : Will you revise your inventory norms and sourcing policies?

SD : At Milacron, we have always believed in JIT (Just In Time) philosophy. It’s a Japanese way of doing things where the right number of parts arrive at the right place, at the right time. It reduces inventory costs and space. However, with the pandemic uncertainty looming across, we plan to increase inventory of all long lead items, the imported parts and the fast-moving parts. This is being done to avoid disruption to the production schedule and also to cater to our Aftermarket services. Our customers rely heavily of Milacron’s Aftermarket services to keep their production going and Milacron is always committed to our customers.

As a part of our global sourcing norms, we have multiple vendors for the same parts. Hence the dependency on one vendor is minimized and hence the unavoidable delays from vendor end can be avoided.

MPDS : Will you be considering higher automation to reduce dependence on labor?

SD : Milacron has a state-of-the-art facility in Ahmedabad. We have a healthy mix of men and machines at the shop floor. Assembly line is traditionally a labor- intensive task. And human intervention in unavoidable in such cases. We have however automated the tasks which had automation available. For future, we intend to increase efficiency of our people thereby increasing the number of machines produced, without increasing the number of people at the shop floor.

Additionally, we have MI 4.0 (IoT) services which can be installed on any Milacron machine. This enables our machine users to remotely monitor their machines from anywhere in the world. They will have access to production data from the respective machine, energy consumption patterns etc. Hence the dependence on labor is reduced.

MPDS : What challenges do you continue to face with regards to migration of labor, monitoring of employees, and COVID-19 protocols?

SD : At Milacron, we follow all the government specified COVID-19 protocols. We give highest priority to our employees safety and well-being. All the employees entering the factory, go through sanitization tunnels at all entry points, the body temperature checks are done at regular intervals. Automatic sanitizer dispensers have been installed throughout the factory. In addition, we have factory sanitization between every shift change..