Quality circle contest kicks off on right note

The first quality circle competition organised by the Automotive Components Manufacturers Association (ACMA), southern region, received a great response. Fifty-eight teams from 38 member companies took part in the contest. Sundaram Clayton’s brakes division in Padi and its die-castings unit in Hosur bagged the first two positions while IP Rings was in the third spot.

Executive director of Ashok Leyland, JN Amrolia who gave away the awards, said that the two key differentiators between successful and non-successful companies are good shopfloor practices and quality of people. In his view, personnel on the shopfloor are vital as they are far more closely involved in manufacturing. Amrolia reiterated that shop level managers have to continuously nurture quality circles. “Quality teams must be empowered to try new ideas even if it is not conducive initially. Information should be available to the workforce so that the ideas are in tandem with the overall vision," he said.

C Narasimhan, chief mentor of the ACMA Centre for Technology and advisor to Sundaram Clayton, said that the auto sector is facing challenges in costs. “Cost reduction needs to be done internally through group activities like quality circles. These will help reach the people on the shopfloor who are actually responsible for manufacturing,” he added.

V Ramachandran, chairman of the southern region of ACMA, said that the competition strove to promote the quality circle movement within an organisation systematically. VR Janardhanam, chairman of the jury and senior president of Sundaram Brake Linings had this to say: “In this competitive world, to know is not enough and it is, therefore, necessary to learn continuously. Small things lead to perfection and perfection is not a small thing. So one needs to continuously improve to reach the goal and quality circles will support this initiative.”

The project that won the first prize was ‘Improvement in Overall Line Efficiency’ of a particular production line. The Sundaram Clayton team identified the bottleneck and found that machine availability was only 69 percent resulting in offering 84 percent service. The team exercised the root cause analysis and corrected the error. It also substituted another material for the machine component that caused breakdowns and tweaked it to the maximum.

Consequently, machine availability improved to 77 percent, eventually offering 100 percent service to customers. This project saved Rs 3 lakh for Sundaram Clayton. The company has 60 quality circles with complete involvement of its employees. On an average, it saves around Rs 1.5 crore annually thanks to several initiatives.