CIOIN

Sri Karumbati

CIO,Stumpp, Schuele & Somappa Springs

“What separates good companies from the rest is the importance they give to IT,” says Sri Karumbati, CIO, Stumpp, Schuele & Somappa Springs, who admits he doesn’t have an IT background.

Executive summary

Why more manufacturers should follow this spring manufacturer's bid to increase efficiency using IT—and the MBA who’s made it his mission to help them.

Complacency is a vice Stumpp, Schuele & Somappa Springs can afford. It is, after all the Schumacher of spring manufacturing in India, with a market share of over 50 percent.
But as its executives like to say, SSSS didn’t get to the top of the heap by being complacent—and it certainly wasn’t going to start slacking now.
For the unfamiliar, the Rs 250-crore company manufactures springs for the auto industry that go into everything from suspension valves to seat belts. The company produces the critical components which ensure your brakes work when a lost puppy wanders into your path or that your daughter is firmly strapped to her seat when your car goes over a ditch. Ones of the earliest spring manufacturers in India, SSSS’ client list—ranging from Hyundai to Harley Davidson—reads like the who’s who of the auto world and extends to textile and white goods manufacturers.
Yet, the truth is, the big daddy of Indian springs wasn’t entirely ready to take on the future. The company, which represents the wisdom of old-school values, was also enslaved by them. Underneath its hood lay process inefficiencies, an over-dependence on manual processes, and a 30 year-old IT set-up in dire need of a do-over. If SSSS wanted to keep leading the industry, it would need to take IT more seriously.

Bouncing Forward on IT
The wood-paneled corporate headquarters of SSSS, in Bangalore’s posh Koramangala district, sits adjacent to its sparklingly clean manufacturing unit. It’s easy to be impressed by the company’s buildings, but Sri Karumbati, CIO, SSSS, knows where the company’s real money spinners are located.
“Our machines are our assets. They are the ones making us money, not our buildings. It was important to monitor their efficiency, because what gets measured, gets managed,” says Karumbati.
While the productivity of SSSS’ expensive machines was measured, there was a large scope for improvement—which also meant SSSS wasn’t using its machines optimally.
Before Karumbati came along, SSSS kept track of the productivity of its machines manually. During a shift every operator was tasked with monitoring his machine on what SSSS called a yellow card. Information like how many times a machine was stopped, for how long—and why—found it’s way on the yellow card.
But with several tens of machines in each of its 12 plants, that added up to a lot of paper. Which made it close to impossible to monitor how long a machine—even the ones imported at great cost—was idle and unproductive.
Neither did this approach allow SSSS to fix recurring downtime problems. There were a number of reasons why a machine was idle, including power outages, an operator forgetting to line up enough raw materials, or a machine being reset. But without the ability to collate data easily, executives weren’t able to tell—often and accurately—the major reasons for downtime—and therefore weren’t able to fix chronic issues at regular intervals.
Worse the business with the yellow cards allowed machines to stay offline longer than was necessary, because an operations manager couldn’t rectify a problem until someone picked up the phone and told him there was one.
“We could add more machines to keep up with demand—at huge capital expense—and not be sure whether we really needed to. We knew there was idle capacity in our existing plant, but we didn’t know precisely how much,” says Karumbati.
What SSSS needed, Karumbati knew, was an MES (manufacturing execution system), which would ensure its spring machines were monitored by a software. The solution counted the number of springs manufactured and when it was off and why. The system consists of a piece of hardware that sits on a spring machine, through which machine data is fed into a software backend. The device on the spring machine allows an operator to choose from a short list of reasons for downtime, ranging from a tea to a power break.
The application is browser-based and can be accessed via the Internet using any device. It can tell supervisors, operational heads, and senior management—in real time—which machines are not online—allowing them to fix problems faster. And it can create longer-term reports which  could help executives pick out machinesthat weren’t being used optimally—and, more importantly, why.
Within a month of the project’s launch, Karumbati began to see patterns emerge. Of the three shifts SSSS runs (6AM-2PM, 2PM-10PM, 10PM-6AM), the third—the night shift—almost consistently produced lower numbers. This was something management had suspected but the numbers were worse than they had expected.
“The reports helped us make some very pertinent decisions relating to the shop floor and the operators,” says Karumbati, who is not comfortable getting into the reasons behind the lower productivity numbers.
As a result of those decisions, Karumbati reports, that the MES project has improved machine uptime at SSSS by 20 percent.
“The system has brought in a new degree of accountability and transparency and weeded out some inefficiencies like extended periods of downtime,” says Sudhakar M., VP-Operations, Stumpp, Schuele & Somappa Springs. “The MES had significantly improved the uptime which has helped us service our customers better. Our goal is to achieve 75 percent uptime.”
It also begun to help management make proactive decisions that directly affected the bottom-line. For example, on a day SSSS was producing a low number of orders, operation executives could plan which machines to run for just two shifts, doing away with a third shift and its associated costs.
“Today, I can sit in my office, browse through these reports and take necessary actions,” says Sudhakar.
The project is only in its first phase covering 30 machines in the Bangalore plant. But there’s a lot more to come, says Karumbati, both in terms of the number of machines MES will cover, and the benefits it can bring SSSS. For example, says Karumbati, MES numbers could be the basis on which incentives are created. Or it could help SSSS create more traceability among the 1.5 million springs—in 4,000 variants—that it produces everyday. (Traceability is an important offering in the auto sector and especially useful if an OEM is forced to recall a specific batch of cars with defective batch of springs.)

Follow Up, Follow Through
The MES project was a technological challenge, given that Karumbati and his team had to find ways to plug into the expensive machines without the help of the original vendors. But, although Karumbati plays it down, there were leadership challenges too.
First was building respect for an IT system in a hard-core manufacturing set-up—in which the same project had failed before.
The last time SSSS had decided to try something similar, says Karumbati, it had backfired. Although the project was before his time, Karumbati asked enough questions to figure out that the failure was due to a flawed solution and a lack of follow-through—mistakes he vowed he wasn’t going to make.
So the first thing he did was pick out a suitable solution and partner. The last project had failed, he says, because of the half-hearted commitment of the vendors and SSSS’ inability to extract better service.
“Most mid-tier vendors behave like technology providers—not solution providers, says Karumbati. “They come in with their tools, put in a product without understanding what the company needs, and walk off before the benefits are realized.”
Karumbati insisted on a long-term commitment from his vendor. The partner he chose, Optibiz, was someone Karumbati had worked with from his time in the US. He convinced Optibiz not only to set up shop in India, but to also tailor its solution to meet the specific needs of SSSS.
His relationship with Optibiz also ensured that SSSS avoided significant cost and complication associated with engaging an external consultant. To lower the cost of the project further, Karumbati spent months scouting for a local hardware vendor with the right offering and the right price-point.
Karumbati also ensured that the reports the MES project produced were taken seriously at executive meetings and that improvements were made based on them—putting operations in the limelight.
“I was both scared and excited,”
says Sudhakar.
But this couldn’t have been easy for Karumbati either: He was new and could easily be seen as someone overstepping his boundaries. Yet he persevered, encouraged by the support he received.
“The technology is just a tool. What we do with these reports and the insights we derive are what will impact the top line,” he says. “For example, the reports pointed out that 18-20 percent of our capacity was being underutilized. That was a clear sign that our sales guys needed to get out there and bring us more business.”
Indian Spring
For Karumbati, the MES project represents only a small first step. But it’s in the right direction and he’s ecstatic it’s been made.Ecstatic isn’t a term you would associate with the mild-mannered and composed Karumbati. But then the MES project is the start of a larger dream he’s been chasing for some years: To improve Indian manufacturing’s efficiency using IT.
“What separates good companies from the rest is the importance they give to IT,” says Karumbati, who openly admits he doesn’t have an IT background. Karumbati is an MBA who spent years working with auto power houses in the US. During his time there, Karumbati says he heard first-hand the poor reputation Indian manufacturers suffered from, especially when they compared to their counterparts from China and Brazil.
"Indian suppliers operated at lower productivity and had challenges with quality, cost and delivery. Besides, many processes were still paper-based,” he says.
That was a reputation he wanted to fix.
So when he returned to India, he was dismayed with the general lackadaisical attitude towards IT that Indian manufacturers had. That’s until he met Ravi Machani, joint-MD, SSSS, at an ACMA meeting.
An ex-SAP expert, Machani shared Karumbati’s vision to uplift the industry using IT. Soon enough, he asked Karumbati to join onboard and start the process of change beginning with the MES project.
Karumbati isn’t stopping at SSSS. As an active member of ACMA, he’s a recognized face in auto forums; championing the need for IT-enabled business transformation. Following the success at SSSS, he is determined to spread the story across the industry volunteering to help them make a similar shift.
“Today, IT is being limited to an e-mail service and a rudimentary ERP. Everything else is considered to be too complicated and expensive. We need to step out of this mindset and embrace change,” he says.