07 Jun
It was a hot and sultry afternoon in Kolkata. The Logistics Head East of Victory Cement Mr. Arun Shanker is in a pensive mood seating at his office thinking as to how to streamline and turnaround the dispatch performance from plant. The Victory cement has come up with a state of the art cement manufacturing facility in the neighbouring districts of Kolkata and has got a capacity to produce 2.4 MTPA cement which is expected to go up to 3.0 MTPA very soon. The company wants to be a major player in terms of both volume and market share in East and thereby continuously on a spree to increase capacity either by brownfield expansion or by greenfield expansion. The company is commissioning another 1.2 MTPA grinding unit in Odisha beginning next month. The Company has in fact deployed its own fleet of 20 vehicles (10 6W & 10 12W) in its WB plant to ensure timely delivery as well as to weed out the fluctuations of fleet availability. There are other 20 no.s of 6W deployed by another dedicated transporter M/S Sumant Agrawal is also cautioning to withdraw the same because of not making adequate no. of trips and profit. These trucks especially the 6W are required to run within the short lead distance from the plant to make the operation viable. But the challenge is that ever since these vehicles are deployed the operations is yet to make break even and accumulating losses. The CFO of the organization Mr. Batra has been repeatedly following up Mr. Sarkar as well as with the Sales team advising them to ensure profitability of these trucks failing which he’ll be constrained to withdraw these trucks and put it either to the newly commissioned plant in Odisha or even may shit them to the plant near to Mumbai to cater to the dispatches of its premium product Ready to Use (RU). There are several other challenges the Plant Logistics team is facing like overall order availability which keeps fluctuating and generally skewed at the month end, undue delay and detention at the customer point, inconsistent dispatch limiting the fleet availability and transporters’ reluctance, longer loading and waiting time inside the plant and bottlenecks like road loading gets hampered when rakes are under loading etc., truckers’ not using tarpaulins during rains leading to truck availability and damages which are all impacting both logistics cost as well as Cost of Sales because of low and inconsistent despatches.
However, Mr. Shanker has very recently had an interaction with MD, CEO & CMO in the recently concluded sales conference wherein he was advised to work on consistency in despatches, increasing the despatch capability from the plant to cater to the expansion, on debottlenecking issues and making own fleet profitable. The MD has also instructed him to revert with his action plan on all these issues clearly mentioning the logistics cost reduction per MT shall be done Apart Mr. Selvarajan, CMO to whom Arun Shanker reports to also given him the green signal to seek whatever support he requires to streamline the dispatches, service level to ensure on time delivery and customer satisfaction. The CMO also advised him to do a brainstorming with his logistics and packing plant colleagues and revert with a detailed presentation incorporating the action plan to be presented to the MD, CEO & CMO together sometime next week. There are approximately 170 no.s trucks loaded per day and overall availability goes maximum up to 200 no.s. corresponding to 17 transporters at the WB plant. And there are three packers each having capacity of 240 TPH with two chutes each. However, the actual output produced by them is between 150-170 TPH and while a rake is loaded all the 6 chutes are engaged for rail loading so that the Rake loading could be completed within the stipulated free time as given by the Railways and road loading gets stopped. Typically, a full rake loading takes 7-9 hrs time and even otherwise around 350-400 MT of cement loading happens through these six chutes in an hour. There is one major cement silo available which has got a capacity of 5000 MT and another small one of 800 MT for the premium product Ready to Use (RU). The company is coming up with a third product next month which is also going to add further complexity in terms of supply and despatch planning. The Logistics Head Mr. Arun Shanker is a veteran in his field and has seen this plant from its inception however invariably facing major challenges when faced with increasing volume and further complexity in terms of product mix and supply planning. In keeping in mind the tasks ahead Shanker has visited the plant, had a detailed discussion with the plant team and just returned to his office mulling over the ways and means to do it. In order to make his plans a robust one Arun Shanker has met with Mr. Gaurav Nandan, the Strategy & Planning Head to deliberate how do the Logistics & Supply Chain in Victory cement can add value in terms of impact made with respect to the challenges as mentioned in the above paragraphs.
