The First Batch

Nine seconds

Two days before her first batch, Meena read me her process over the phone, and it took her nine seconds.

"Mix, fill, label, pack," she said. "Then stack by the shutter."

That is not a process. That is a memory of a process, and it lives in one head, which happens to be the head that will also be at the bank, at the GST office and at her daughter's parent-teacher meeting. The day she is not on the floor, the person mixing will do it the way it looks right to them. I know this because I let it happen to me.

In June 2004, in my third month, I had a helper called Bhimrao who had worked at another box unit in Bhosari and knew how to cook starch glue for the corrugator. I did not. So I let him make it by eye: a bucket of starch, some caustic, some borax, water until it "looked right". For two weeks it did. Then one Saturday he was at a wedding in Satara, a second boy made the glue by watching the bucket the way Bhimrao did, and on Monday a customer in Chakan sent back 640 boxes with the layers peeling apart at the flute. At ₹9.40 a box, that was a little over ₹6,000 of board, plus the reprint, plus a very cold phone call. Nobody had done anything wrong. There was simply nothing written down for anyone to do right.

So before a machine runs, write the process on one sheet of paper, in the words the person doing it actually uses. I give people five rules:

• Every line starts with a verb. Weigh, pour, stir, check, fill. Not "mixing stage".
• Every line has a number. Litres, kilograms, minutes, temperature. "Some" and "until ready" are banned.
• Every line names a check. What does the operator look at, smell, measure or weigh before moving on?
• Every line names who. One person, by role.
• Every line says what happens if the check fails. Stop and call whom? Set the batch aside where?

Meena and I went through it again that evening, line by line. Her first nine seconds became this, roughly:

1. Check drums of concentrate against the supplier's invoice and batch number. Storekeeper. If the batch number is missing, do not open the drum.
2. Fill the tank with 400 litres of water, using the marked dipstick.
3. Weigh the concentrate on the platform scale, to her supplier's ratio for that grade.
4. Pour it in slowly while the stirrer runs, for 20 minutes.
5. Take a 100 ml sample in a glass jar. Check that it is milky white with no oily layer on top after five minutes. If there is a layer, stir ten more minutes and test again. If it is still there, stop and phone Meena.
6. Fill one-litre bottles. Weigh every tenth bottle; it must read between 1,040 and 1,060 grams with the cap on.
7. Cap and label. Check the batch number on the label matches the tank.
8. Pack twelve to a carton and tape it.
9. Write the carton count and any rejected bottles in the register.

Nine lines, one page. Her son typed it in Marathi and English and had it laminated at a shop on Trimbak Road for ₹40.

The point is not neatness. A written process means a second person can run the batch on the day you are in a meeting. It also means that when scrap appears, and it will, you can put your finger on the line where it began instead of arguing about who was careless. Bhimrao, to his credit, was the one who later asked me to write the glue recipe on the wall above the cooker in red paint, so he could stop being phoned at weddings.

Meena rang back an hour after we finished.

"Line five," she said. "If the oily layer won't go and I'm not reachable. What then?"

I told her I didn't have an answer yet. That was the right question to be stuck on, two days before switch-on.

Trial batches and the scrap number nobody wants to see

My first month of running boxes, I did not measure scrap. I told myself it was low. I could see the offcuts going into a corner, and the corner did not look very full, and anyway the kabadiwala came every Saturday and took it all away for cash, which felt like income rather than loss.

In the fifth week Bhimrao asked me if I wanted the scrap weighed before the kabadiwala's boy loaded it. I said yes, mostly to look like a man who weighed things. It came to 612 kilograms for the week. I had bought a little under 4.5 tonnes of kraft paper in the same seven days. That is roughly fourteen per cent of my paper going out of the back gate at ₹7 a kilo, when I had paid nearly ₹19 a kilo for it to come in at the front. I had been costing my boxes on an assumption of four per cent. Nobody had lied to me. I had simply chosen not to know.

So the rule I give everyone now is short. Weigh what goes in, count what comes out, and write down the difference from the first hour of the first batch. The difference is scrap, whatever name you prefer to call it: wastage, process loss, spillage, rejection, "normal".

A trial batch exists to produce that number. It does not exist to produce stock. I tell people to plan three trial batches before they sell anything to a stranger, and to run them on full-size equipment but at a size they can afford to throw away. The first shows you what you forgot. The second shows you whether the fix worked. The third is the first one you are allowed to believe.

Meena ran her first batch on 28 July, a Monday. She had 400 litres of water in the tank and her concentrate weighed in to the supplier's ratio, which should have filled something close to 410 one-litre bottles. I asked her to ring me at five o'clock with one number and nothing else.

"Three hundred and seventy-one good bottles," she said. "But the first hour was just learning."

"How many in the first hour?"

"Forty-something were rejected. Underweight, mostly. One cap split. Some spilled when Sangeeta was getting the nozzle right." Sangeeta was her filler, a neighbour's daughter on her first paid job.

I worked it out while she waited. Thirty-nine bottles short of 410 is a loss of about nine and a half per cent. Her project report, the one Mr Kulkarni had gone through with his red pen, assumed two.

"The first hour counts," I said. "The customer's bottle doesn't know it was filled in the first hour."

She did not like that, and I understood why. Every new owner wants to treat the opening hours as rehearsal and start the real count once things settle down. The trouble is that things settle down at whatever level you accept. If you begin counting only once the scrap looks respectable, it will always look respectable, and the real figure will turn up months later in your bank balance with no explanation attached.

What I asked her to do that night is what I ask everyone to do after a trial:

• Split the loss by cause, even roughly. Underweight fills, spillage at the nozzle, damaged caps, mislabels.
• Find the single biggest cause and change one thing only.
• Run the next batch and compare it against the same headings.

Her biggest cause was underweight fills, twenty-two bottles, because Sangeeta was closing the tap by sight. On Wednesday Meena drew a marker line on a sample bottle at exactly 1,050 grams and stood it beside the filling point as a reference. The second batch lost seventeen bottles. The third lost nine.

Nine bottles in roughly 410 is a little over two per cent. That is close to what her report had promised the bank, and it took her three days and about ₹2,600 worth of phenyl that went down the drain at the back of the shed to get there.

On Thursday she sent me a photograph of the register. Under the third batch, in her teacher's handwriting, was the figure 9, and beside it, underlined twice, the 39 from Monday.

The sheet I fill in before tea

The 612 kilograms frightened me into weighing scrap every day. Within a fortnight I had a different problem. I was now writing numbers on the backs of delivery challans, in a diary, on the wall beside the slotter and once, I am embarrassed to say, on my own forearm. I knew more than before and could find none of it when I needed it.

At the auto-parts supplier in Chinchwad, the plant manager had received a daily production report every morning. It ran to four pages and nobody read past the first. I had typed it for three years. What I took from that job was the opposite lesson: a report that takes longer to read than to fill in is decoration. So I drew a grid on one sheet of foolscap, photocopied fifty of them at a shop near Bhosari bus stand for ₹25, and promised myself I would complete one before nine every morning, covering the day before.

This is the one for Monday, 14 June 2004. I kept it because it was the first one I filled in honestly.

	Sunday 13 June
Output	3,240 boxes (3-ply, 2 sizes)
Paper issued / scrap	2,180 kg / 196 kg = 9.0%
Machine downtime	Slotter 1 hr 50 min (belt snapped, no spare)
Cash received	₹18,600 (cheque, Pimpri medical distributor)
Cash due, over 30 days	₹1,74,000 (₹1,12,000 from one buyer)
One quality complaint	Flaps cracking on 200 boxes, Hadapsar sweet shop

Six lines. That is the whole thing, and every line earns its place.

• Output tells you whether the day happened at all.
• Scrap percentage catches the problem I had ignored for five weeks. Write the percentage, never just the kilograms. Kilograms rise when output rises and lull you.
• Downtime is written against the machine, with the reason. That belt cost me nearly two hours and ₹140 to replace. I bought two spares that afternoon.
• Cash received is money in the bank or in hand. Invoices raised do not count.
• Cash due is the line that would have saved Vilas. Look at mine: ₹1.12 lakh of ₹1.74 lakh owed by one buyer, three months after I had watched a man go under for exactly that reason.
• One quality complaint, even on a good day. If nobody complained, write the worst defect you found yourself. Forcing one entry stops you pretending the column is optional.

It took me about eleven minutes. Most of that went on finding the weighbridge slip.

The flaps, for what it is worth, were cracking because the paper had been stored near the shutter after the May flood and had dried brittle. I would not have connected the two if the complaint and the scrap figure had not sat four inches apart on the same page.

I told Meena to start hers the morning after her third batch, not after her first sale. She asked whether she could do it in the evening instead, when the shed was quiet and she had more time.

"No," I said. "In the evening you'll still be tired and hopeful. At eight in the morning you'll be honest."

"And if a line is zero?"

"Write zero. Zero cash received is the most useful number on the sheet."

People resist this for longer than you would expect. One owner in Chakan told me he did not need a sheet because he "had it all in his head". I asked him what his scrap had been the previous Tuesday. He told me it was a Tuesday. I have heard every version of that answer, and I gave a few myself in April 2004.

The first month is irritating. You will find the slip missing, the supervisor late with the downtime, the bank statement not yet updated. Fill in what you can and leave a gap where you cannot. Gaps are information too: three blank downtime lines in a week tell you nobody is watching the machines.

Meena's first sheet came through on WhatsApp on 1 August, at 8.47. Every line was filled except one. Under "Cash due" she had written "nobody owes me yet" and drawn a small, careful line through the box.

Quality without a quality department

For my first nine years in Bhosari there was no quality department. There was a steel ruler, a ₹2,900 moisture meter, and whoever happened to be standing at the machine. That is enough, provided you are clear about one thing: a defect is born at a particular step, and that is the step where someone has to look for it. Inspecting finished boxes at the dispatch door only tells you how much you have already wasted.

So the rule on my floor is one check at each step where something can go wrong, done by the person running that step, at fixed times, and written down. For Meena that came to three checks:

• Weigh every twenty-fifth bottle against the marker line.
• Twist every tenth cap by hand. If it turns, the whole tray is rechecked.
• Keep one sealed bottle from every batch, labelled with the date and batch number, on a shelf for sixty days.

That last one she thought was a waste of stock. It is the cheapest insurance in the shed. When a customer says the phenyl has gone cloudy, you take down the retained bottle from the same batch and look. Either yours has gone cloudy too, or his storeroom is the problem.

Beside the checks sits a defect log, a ruled notebook with six columns: date, batch, defect, quantity, likely cause, what was changed. It is duller than it sounds and more useful than any software I have bought since. The Morning Sheet asks for one complaint. The log is where you find out whether it is the same complaint for the fourth week running.

The supplier nobody wrote down

Jignesh (I have changed his name) ran a detergent powder unit in Aji GIDC, Rajkot, with about eighteen people and distributors in Jamnagar and Morbi. In the monsoon of 2019 his purchase man found a new trader offering soda ash at ₹1.40 a kilogram less, and switched. It was a sensible saving. He told nobody, and nothing on paper recorded which supplier's material went into which batch.

The powder caked inside its packets within three weeks of leaving the factory. Distributors sent back cartons by the truckload. By the time Jignesh traced the problem to the new soda ash, which held more moisture, he had taken a little over ₹3 lakh in returns, reprocessing and freight. Finding the cause took nineteen days, most of them spent arguing about the mixer.

His fix cost nothing. One extra column in the incoming register, giving supplier and lot number, copied onto the batch card. He told me later that he now insists on knowing when anyone changes a supplier, "even for the tape."

Certificates on the wall

There are two kinds of certification, and they deserve different answers.

BIS marking is compulsory for a growing list of products under Quality Control Orders, and if yours is on it, you cannot legally sell without a licence. Check the current list on the BIS website before you buy a machine, not after. I do not know which products will be added next year, and neither does the consultant who says he does.

ISO 9001 is voluntary, and it pays only when a buyer asks for it in writing. Auto vendors in Hosur and Chakan ask. So do some exporters and some tenders. I got mine in 2013 because a pharmaceutical customer made it a condition of a contract, and it cost me about ₹1.1 lakh in the first year, audits included. Before that request it would have been decoration. I once sat in the reception of a Talawade unit with three framed certificates behind the owner's chair. It closed in 2016 with ₹40 lakh stuck in debtors. The certificates were still on the wall when the bank came.

Meena called on the evening of 2 August. Her Morning Sheet was going in on time, her scrap was holding near two per cent, and a cleaning contractor in Ambad wanted 300 bottles a month.

"The dealer in Panchavati sells at ₹85," she said. "I'll quote ₹70."

"What does one bottle cost you to make?"

There was a pause long enough for me to hear the Satpur traffic behind her.

"Roughly sixty," she said.

Roughly. It was the word Vilas had used.