Excerpts from a conversation with August’s Timbor Star – Saumil, Floor Manager at Changodar

Excerpts from a conversation with August’s Timbor Star – Saumil, Floor Manager at Changodar.

The battle between production and sales is of epic proportions, both departments being different sides of the same coin. Equally important for the success of any kind of business – these two are usually at loggerheads.

The sales team or person on the floor is the face of a company. He/She needs to ensure targets are met; customers are satisfied, and have to deal with the tantrums of a customer. The sales person convinces a customer of a product, ensures payment and has to even follow up/bear the criticism if something goes wrong. On the other hand, the production or factory team does not usually have any kind of interaction with the customer.

Sales thinks that all the factory needs to do is ensure that the product is ready for dispatch. The factory feels that the sales people are sitting in air-conditioned offices and lead an easy life. For this issue of the newsletter, we decided to find out exactly what the production process entails. Who better to ask than Saumil.

Editor: Tell us exactly what you do? And what is with this soft board of yours?

Saumil: My main priority is scheduling the orders that we receive from the stores – from the start to its end – the entire production cycle. This is not as simple as it sounds. Orders need to be scheduled according to machine capacity. The time that every order would take depends on its category as there are different production cycles for laminate, wood, paint, and so on.

The soft board illustrates where each single order is placed in the production cycle. This enables me to know exactly how many days an order is going to take, whether it is going to be delayed.

Editor: Can you elaborate on the main issues that arise during production?

Saumil: Material – As we all know, a single kitchen is not just made out of one particular type of material. Whether hardware or raw material related, if all the materials are not ready or available – the kitchen will remain pending in the production cycle.

Machines – Our machines are fully computerized and if one stops working – inevitably there is a delay. As these machines are imported, it takes atleast 3 days to get a replacement or software update if something does go wrong. Also, it will never be that all the machines stop working on the same day. On average, this happens once a month.

Power Fluctuation – this causes the maximum complications. Nowadays, almost every machine has a chip or works on software. Whenever there are power fluctuations, this causes an issue in the software programming of the machines which further causes a delay.

Editor: What are some things you think the sales department should be aware of?

Saumil: It is important to have product knowledge, which every person on the floor is very well versed in. Having an idea as to the product cycle duration is of equal importance.

A major complication that is faced is when an urgent order is sent to us for production scheduling. Since all the machines run on a certain capacity, materials have to be procured in advance, etc. – an order that comes between the already set schedules makes the other orders move down the list and thus causes a delay.