Running the Place Without Living In It

Seven sheets on one table

It was Ganesh, calling from the dispatch desk at the end of the night shift. I was standing on the veranda of a homestay in Alappuzha in my vest, and my wife was giving me the look she gives me when I check the phone at weddings.

"Sir, Gokhale company has sent back eighteen hundred cartons," he said. "Their QC says burst strength is low."

Eighteen hundred pump cartons was about ₹61,000 of board, ink and labour, and it was the customer who had taken me eleven months to win. I asked Ganesh whether anything had gone wrong on the floor that week. He said no. He said the Morning Sheet had been filled every day, on time, and Sunita had emailed me a photo of each one. Both statements were true. I had looked at every photo with my first cup of tea and gone back to watching the boats.

That afternoon I put the five sheets side by side on the phone screen, scrolling with one thumb. Corrugator scrap read 2.8 per cent on Monday, then 3.1, 3.3, 3.6 and 4.0 by Friday. I had told Ganesh to ring me if scrap crossed five. It never did. Each day, taken alone, looked like an ordinary day. Together they looked like a ramp. The flute roll on the corrugator was wearing, the flutes were coming out shallower, the board was getting weaker by the shift, and the sheet I was so proud of had recorded every step of it without anyone noticing the direction.

A Morning Sheet tells you about yesterday. It cannot tell you about a slope. For that you need the week.

The Monday forty minutes

Since June 2012 we have held a weekly review every Monday at ten, in the office above the floor, and it has never once been cancelled for a customer visit. Sunita brings the seven sheets from the previous week, Monday to Sunday, in a plastic sleeve. Ganesh comes up from the floor and the day-shift in-charge joins him. I make the tea, which I mention because it means I am not holding a pen and cannot start rewriting anyone's numbers before they have explained them.

Sunita copies four lines from the daily sheets on to one page. A recent week looked like this:

	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
Output (tonnes board)	11.2	11.6	10.9	11.4	9.8	11.1
Corrugator scrap %	3.0	2.9	3.1	3.0	3.2	3.0
Downtime (minutes)	25	0	40	15	110	20
Cash received (₹ lakh)	2.1	0.4	3.8	0	1.6	0.9

Sunday is blank because we do not run.

We ask three questions, always in the same order:

• What has moved the same way three days running? Three is my threshold. Two is noise. Five is a returned consignment.
• Which machine's downtime adds up to more than an hour? Friday's 110 minutes in that week was the printer-slotter, a feed belt that had been patched twice before. One bad day is a breakdown. The same machine twice in a month is a maintenance plan nobody is following.
• Who owes us more this Monday than last Monday? The daily sheet shows cash in. The weekly page shows which customer has quietly slid from forty days to fifty-five.

Each answer gets a name and a date beside it on the page. Nobody leaves until every line has one. Most Mondays take thirty-five minutes. The Monday after the flute roll took two hours, and I deserved every one of them.

When I told Meena all this, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said she had six weeks of Morning Sheets in a green folder on the shelf above Rekha's mixing tank, every one filled in, and she had never opened the folder once she had put a sheet inside.

"Go and get it," I said. "I'll wait."

I heard the plastic chair scrape on the Satpur floor, and her footsteps going away.

Caps, reels and a piece of chalk

She came back with the folder and read me the six weeks down the phone, one column at a time, the way Sunita does on Mondays. Output was steady. Scrap had settled near two per cent once Rekha stopped eyeballing the pine oil. Then, in the downtime column for a Wednesday in week four, she found a note in her own handwriting: "Caps over. Stopped 2 p.m."

"I remember that day," she said. "Rekha filled bottles and lined them up on the floor without caps. We capped them on Friday."

Two days of filled, open phenyl bottles on a shed floor is a small thing, and also exactly how a factory runs out of money. Nothing was wrong with her supplier. She simply had no number that told her when to reorder. She bought caps when she saw the carton was nearly empty, and on that Wednesday nobody had looked.

The reorder line

Every bought-in item on your floor needs one written figure: the stock level at which you place the next order. Mine is worked out the same way for kraft reels as for staple wire.

Minimum level = daily use × supplier lead time in days + safety days × daily use

Meena's numbers for caps came to this:

Bottles filled per day (average)	60
Lead time from her cap supplier in Ahmedabad	8 days
Safety days	4
Minimum level	60 × (8 + 4) = 720 caps

At ₹2.40 a cap, holding 720 costs her about ₹1,730 of cash sitting on a shelf. I told her to count out 720, put them in a separate carton, write "OPEN THIS = PHONE AHMEDABAD" on the lid in marker, and keep the working stock in front of it. Crude. It works in my factory for gum powder, stitching wire and printing ink, and nobody has to remember anything.

Safety days are a judgement. I keep four for suppliers who have never let me down, and ten for the paper mill in Kolhapur district that once took nineteen days during a cane-season truck shortage. Do not set every item at ten because it feels safe. That is how you end up with ₹4 lakh of ink nobody needs.

Oldest out first

In the winter of 2005 a customer sent back a lot of biscuit cartons that were cracking at the score lines. The board had been made from a reel that had sat at the back of my store since the previous March, behind thirty newer reels, absorbing every monsoon morning through its outer wraps. Nobody had chosen to use an old reel. We had simply always unloaded the truck in front and picked from the front. The oldest paper in the building was the paper we never reached until it was too late to be any good.

First in, first out is the rule, and the method matters more than the rule. Our reels now come in from the east side of the rack and go to the corrugator from the west side, so the floor itself forces the order. Each reel gets the month of arrival chalked on its end in large figures. If a helper pulls a reel marked "8" while a "6" is still on the rack, any supervisor walking past can see it from twenty feet.

Meena has no racks. She put a strip of yellow tape across her raw-material corner and told Rekha that new drums go on the left of the tape and the mixing tank is fed from the right.

The last Saturday

Once a month, on the last Saturday after the day shift, we count everything. Two people do it together, and one of them must not be the person who runs the store. The count goes on a printed list against what the books say we should have.

The first time I insisted on this, in 2008, the books said 212 reels and the rack held 197. Fifteen reels at that year's prices was a little over ₹1.6 lakh. Some had been consumed without being entered, which was carelessness. Two had gone out of the gate in a tempo on a Sunday, which was not.

We now accept a difference of half a per cent and investigate anything above it. Meena did her first count on the last Saturday of September. She rang me afterwards, sounding puzzled.

"The books say eleven drums of pine oil," she said. "I have nine. And one of the nine is empty."

"Find the empty one before you find the missing two," I said. It turned out Rekha had used the last of a drum for a trial batch in August and pushed the empty back into the row so the corner looked tidy. The other two were a delivery entered twice. Nothing stolen. The count found it anyway, which is the point of a count.

Grease before it squeals

In April 2006 buddha stopped in the middle of a 9,000-carton order. A main shaft bearing had run dry, seized, and scored the shaft. The bearing cost ₹1,450. The shaft had to go to a turner in Bhosari, and the slotter stood still for four days while I phoned the customer twice a day to apologise. Shinde, the retired fitter who had inspected my corrugator, came to look at it and asked when it had last been greased. Nobody knew. He did not say anything. He did not need to.

Since then every machine on my floor carries a laminated card hung on a hook at eye level. It has three sections:

• Daily, done by the operator before the first job: oil points, belt tension by thumb, a listen for new noises.
• Weekly, done on Saturday by the shift supervisor: grease nipples, blade condition, loose bolts on the frame.
• Monthly, done by our maintenance man, Anand, on the last Sunday: bearings, gearbox oil level, electrical panel cleaning.

Each line has a box for initials and a date. A card with blank boxes on a Monday is a question I ask in the weekly review, by name.

Planned maintenance tells you what to do. The breakdown log tells you what you got wrong. Ours is a ruled register kept beside the corrugator, with seven columns: date, machine, what failed, time stopped, time restarted, cause as best we know it, and cost. In 2009 Sunita added up the log for the year and found that the glue-pump drive belt on the corrugator had snapped five times, roughly every seven weeks, and each time it stopped the line for close to three hours in the middle of a shift. A belt costs ₹620. We now change it every six weeks on a Sunday whether it looks worn or not. It has not snapped during a shift since.

Meena has one mixing motor and a filling machine. I told her the cards still apply, only shorter. Her first card has four lines.

One weekend, ₹18,000

By 2010 my factory had a problem I could not put a number on. Things were hard to find. A supervisor would spend twenty minutes looking for the slotting knife spanner, then borrow one from the corrugator and leave the corrugator without it. Offcuts lived under the machines. A pallet of printed sheets for a customer who had left in 2008 still sat against the back wall, gathering pigeon droppings.

A consultant had offered me a three-month 5S programme for ₹2.4 lakh. 5S is a Japanese method whose five words come down to: throw out what you do not need, give everything else a fixed place, clean it, write down the standard, and keep checking. I decided to do it over one weekend with my own people instead.

We stopped at 2 p.m. on a Saturday in October. Everyone stayed, paid for the extra hours, with lunch from the canteen. The money went like this:

Steel slotted-angle shelving, four bays	₹11,200
Floor paint, yellow and grey	₹4,600
Marking tape, labels, tool-board pegs	₹2,200
Total	₹18,000

The first job was a red tag on anything nobody could name a use for. By Saturday night the pile in the yard held the 2008 pallet, two broken stitching heads, eleven empty ink drums, a bicycle with no front wheel that nobody admitted owning, and a box of 2006 delivery challans. The kabadiwala paid ₹7,300 for the lot on Monday, so the weekend cost me less than eleven thousand.

On Sunday we painted walkways yellow and machine zones grey, and Ganesh, then a senior operator, made the tool board for the slotter himself. He drew the outline of every spanner on the plywood in black marker, so an empty peg showed its own shape.

On Monday morning the slotting knife spanner was on its outline. On Tuesday afternoon the outline was empty again.

Someone had taken it to the corrugator, because the corrugator's spanner had walked off to the slotter in 2009 and never come back. Ganesh bought a second spanner with his own ₹240 and hung it on the corrugator's board. The fifth S, the checking, turned out to be the only one that cost nothing and the only one that was hard.

Two weeks away

In May 2012 my wife finally got the Kerala trip she had been asking for since 2004. Fourteen days. I left the morning sheet with Sunita, the cheque book in the safe and my phone switched on, which she later said was the real mistake.

The first call came on day three, at 7.40 in the morning on a backwater boat near Alleppey. It was Ganesh, by then supervising the day shift. Our kraft supplier had run short of 150 GSM paper and was offering 140 GSM at ₹1.80 a kilo less. A customer's lorry was due at four.

"Do I take it?" he said.

He knew the cartons better than I did by then. He knew 140 would pass for one customer and fail the compression test for another. What he did not know was whether he was allowed to say yes. Nobody had ever told him.

The second call came on day six. A pharma customer wanted 6,000 cartons pulled forward by three days, which meant pushing back Rakesh's display boxes. Ganesh and the night man had already argued about it. Each had a customer on the phone, and each customer had been promised.

The third came on day nine, from Sunita. The corrugator's preheater thermostat had failed. Anand had found one in Pimpri for ₹14,500, the supplier wanted cash or a cheque before he would release it, and the only person who could sign a cheque was standing on a hillside in Munnar. The line stood still for most of a shift while Sunita paid from her own savings and I transferred it back from a hotel computer that charged ₹60 an hour.

None of these was a disaster. Each was a gap in a system I thought I had. When I got back, I sat with Ganesh, Sunita and Anand for one long afternoon and wrote down who decides what. It fitted on one side of a page, and with small changes it is still pinned above my desk:

• The supervisor decides: shift allocation, overtime up to four hours a person a week, order sequence within the week's agreed plan, and accepting or rejecting incoming material against the written spec.
• The supervisor decides, then tells me the same day: any paper substitution the spec sheet allows for that customer, and any rush order that moves another by less than one day.
• Anand decides: spare parts up to ₹20,000 on any single breakdown, paid from a petty-cash float Sunita holds.
• Sunita decides: payment reminders, and the day-thirty-one call. A second bank signatory for cheques up to ₹50,000.
• I decide: new customers, prices, credit terms, anything that changes a customer's spec, hiring, and any purchase above those limits.

The spec sheet mattered more than the list. Ganesh could not approve 140 GSM because the acceptable grades for each customer lived only in my head. Now they live on a card in the purchase file.

I gave Meena the same exercise, scaled down. Her list has three lines and Rekha's name on two of them. In November she went to her sister's wedding in Aurangabad for four days and received one call, which was to ask where the spare filling nozzle was. It was on its outline.

Something else turned up on that 2012 trip, though I only saw it later. Sitting on a hotel balcony in Munnar reading the morning sheets Sunita sent each day, I noticed a pattern I had looked at for years without seeing. Buddha was booked eleven hours a day. The corrugator ran nine and a half, then stood silent from 7.30 at night until morning, while two orders sat in the dispatch file with dates I was going to miss.

I had been pricing land in Chakan.