Indirect Area Study in Tyre Manufacturing Industry

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Introduction and Client Background

Long before a Tyre ever hits the road, a silent legion of support processes makes its passage through the factory smooth, safe, and quick. These are not the flashy presses placing treads or the high-speed rollers rolling rubber, they're the laboratories checking quality, the technicians who keep maintenance on track, the hands that keep all the wheels turning out of sight.

At one of India's leading two- and three-wheeler Tyre producers, leadership identified that these indirect functions, although not part of the main production line, were essential to attaining operational excellence. To hone this plant backbone, the company collaborated with Production Modeling India (PMI) to analyze and streamline its indirect operations. What ensued was a revolutionary industrial engineering intervention that identified inefficiencies, re-tuned workloads, and provided actionable insights for wiser planning.

Project Objectives

The goal wasn't merely to nudge schedules around or reshuffle staff. The client sought a more profound insight into:

  • How activities were allocated across indirect departments such as maintenance, quality laboratories, and condition monitoring.
  • Which activities contributed tangible value, and which did not.
  • Where time was lost and how resource planning could be optimized.
  • How to improve manpower and machine availability planning using actual data and dynamic dashboards.

With a vision for long-term intelligence, secure mobility, the client understood that perfection starts with clarity, and this research was set up to deliver just that.

Indirect Area Study in Tyre Manufacturing Industry

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Challenges Revealed

Although the shop floor was running smoothly on the outside, the support activities were not as well-oiled. A few of the biggest challenges were:

  • Limited standard time data for indirect activities, rendering manpower planning a game of guesswork.
  • High variation in task execution, especially when operators were multitasking or waiting on approvals.
  • Manpower underutilization, with some departments hovering around just 66.6% utilization.
  • Significant lean wastes, from idle time due to system slowdowns to waiting for instructions or tools.

These weren’t dramatic breakdowns; they were the subtle inefficiencies that, over time, ripple into lost productivity, fatigue, and higher operational costs.

PMI’s Approach

PMI introduced a formal but adaptable approach, based on industrial engineering best practices and adapted to the client's particular setting.

1. Observation and Data Collection

Instead of plunging into spreadsheets, PMI began on the ground—walking the plant floor, observing activity, and interviewing area owners. They documented work content across indirect functions through sample-based time studies, supplemented by past two- to three-month logs. This involved:

• Maintenance activities.
• Quality testing routines.
• Breakdown action and preventive measures.
• Condition-based and time-based monitoring.

2. Work Content Estimation and Analysis

PMI used time study methods to analyze the data and:
• Break down Value-Added (VA) and Non-Value-Added (NVA) work
• Work distribution map and estimate actual resource requirements
• Determine wasteful losses of time, including delays resulting from insufficient skills, software inefficiency, or lacking tools

They also designed intuitive department-wise dashboards to depict daily and monthly demands, indicating the number of shifts, mandays, and resource allocation by department.

Indirect Area Study in Tyre Manufacturing Industry

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Key Findings

The study did not only reveal areas of improvement, but it also measured them.

• Manpower utilization increased from 66.6% to 84.2%, purely due to task redistribution and training recommendations.
• Total workforce in indirect divisions was slashed by 37%, without impacting service levels.
• Productivity was enhanced by 60%, mostly through reducing wasted time on approvals and tool searching.
• An astonishing 48% of manpower loss was attributed to waiting for approvals; 28% from delays arising from inadequate training or troubleshooting capability.

Recommendations Delivered

PMI delivered concise, actionable, and immediately implementable advice that included:

• Condition monitoring and breakdown response skill-based training plans.
• Digital approval workflows to reduce idle time.
• Area-specific FIFO systems and tagging mechanisms to minimize searching time.
• Ownership-driven tool tracking to prevent inter-departmental confusion.
• Use of dynamic dashboards for manpower and machine resource planning daily.
Such transformations, when put in place, did not just guarantee efficiency but also more empowered, flexible employees.

Conclusion

In manufacturing, indirect does not necessarily equate too insignificant. This case study confirms that through shining a light on support processes, businesses are able to deliver major improvements without large capital expenditure.

Backed by PMI, the client converted latent inefficiencies into possibilities, making indirect sections a smoothly oiled machine, silent, consistent, and indispensable. By having streamlined behind-the-scenes, they've established a more solid foundation for creativity, expansion, and world leadership in Tyre manufacturing.

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