Apart from financial and commercial hurdles faced by plastic processing industry, quality and productivity issues dominate the attention of all manufacturers and distributors. These issues, if not resolved quickly and permanently, make the organization unattractive as a reliable supplier. In fact many financial or commercial hurdles have their origin in quality and productivity related issues.

Does your organization relate to any of the following issues?
· Higher rejection percentage than what was calculated while costing.
· Waste of raw material and consumables while setting, manufacturing or due to incorrect mould design.
· Excessive recycling due to above reasons resulting in further quality problems and productivity problems
· Inadvertent usage of wrong grades of raw material or master batches causing batch rejections.
· Error is setting processing parameters, like temperatures, locking or injection pressures, time, mixing proportions, etc causing batch rejections.
· Inability to control process parameters to achieve consistent quality.
· Inability to deliver products on time due to combination of above reasons.
· Misunderstanding of customer's requirements causing rejections after manufacture or delaying the development cycle.
· Inability to control suppliers to give consistent quality of material and services.
· Wrong selection of machines without knowing the capability or deterioration in machine capability over a period of time.

The major cause for quality or productivity related issues being faced repeatedly is absence of systematic approach to solve these permanently. The reasons for the absence of systematic approach are
1. Low awareness of the systems at top management level.
2. Little support by top management for systems.
3. Bad experience with systems itself due to cumbersome methods or namesake introduction.
4. Non-availability of sufficiently skilled persons to implement the systems.
5. Lack of operations training to workforce that can helpimprove their output quality.
6. Lack of awareness of tools already available to overcome these problems.
7. Lack of confidence that we too can be world-class players.

Hence if things have to go wrong, they will, and the management will drift from one crisis to another hoping that situation will improve after some time automatically.-- This is merely wishful thinking.
The situation can improve for better, only and only if; the management to overcome such problems permnently puts up systematic efforts.
Whenever faced with such problems we resort to quick-fix solutions. This results in solving the problem for only few hours or days and same problem repeats again with far higher or costlier consequences. Hence the company remains in a constant fire-fighting mode without eradicating root cause of the problems.
Is there a way out of this mess? Yes!
By adopting system-oriented methods, there is possibility of overcoming the problems permanently. There is some pain and lot of effort involved in systematic working, but the gains will follow slowly but surely.

Common worries when we talk of systems
· Who will do it?
· Can our workforce handle systems?
· Can we maintain it?
· What is the cost involved? etc.
These worries can be overcome and should not come in way of implementing the systems as benefits far outweigh the costs involved.

We are all used to financial systems in the organization like bills, vouchers, cash or bank transaction records, expenses records, payment outstanding records, etc which give us correct idea about our financial status to know whether we are really making profit or not.
But we forget a major point that all this money which we account is generated through the products which we make and hence first control should be established on the products and processes to have better financial performance.
The systems implemented to control processes; products, people, material, suppliers and plant infrastructure will make us competitive in world markets considering quality, cost, delivery and service.

Is it required to change the entire systems all of a sudden? No.
The organization, having decided to embrace systematic working as a philosophy, can take a step by step approach with a certain time frame in mind.

What are the steps involved?
1. Getting the organization audited by an expert in the field of systems to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the organizational activities.
2. Mapping the processes involved in details and finding out the key control points to be established for immediate gains in quality and productivity.
3. Deciding minimum acceptable systems to start with.
4. Deciding the records, formats, documents for such system, standardizing it and implementing it without slipup.
5. Training the persons for the systems importance.
6. Considering sincere implementation of ISO 9001 - 2000 systems as a basic step to overcome problems.
7. Monitoring implementation and its benefits through routine analysis.
8. Making suitable additions or changes to systems based on analysis.

These steps definitely lead to improvements in various aspects of organizations working.
More details about them can be had form our experts as detailed below.

We are available for help on these issues

Our team of experts is always ready to undertake such projects for the plastics industry.
Our team experience of working with variety of organizations for over 250 man-years and also with implementation of systems with over 460 organizations through training, documentation, implementation, attitudinal change, auditing, certification processes comes in handy for such activities.

Our support offices are available at variety of locations in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Daman and Silvassa.

Exclusive training sessions for awareness of systems, attitudinal change and related matters can be conducted as required by customers on case by case basis.

Contact us at sales@plastemart.com