Written Analysis and Communication

Individual Assignment No. 2

Case Analysis Report On

‘PRAMANIK CONTAINERS AND THE BOTTLENECK

CHALLENGE (A)’

Submitted by

Name: Jayant Kushwaha

Roll No: 141119

Section: A

Institute of Management, Nirma University

Date of Submission: 16th Aug 2014

For Office Use:

Grade

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Pramanik Containers Pvt. Ltd. is an aerosol manufacturing company which does business in B2B

selling. Started as family business by Bansilal in 1977, it will now be succeeded by Piyush Mehta, only

son of Bansilal Mehta. Piyush has just completed his MBA and is very keen to work with his father.

But when he sees the mismanagement of inventory and casualness among the workers, he gets quite

baffled. As an MBA graduate, he convinces his father to let him work on this chaos. He comes out with

two solutions, one short term and one long term solution.

Word Count: 097

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SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS:

Pramanik Containers Pvt. Ltd., an aerosol manufacturing company which mainly dealt in B2B selling

was a leading vendor of ABC Pharma, a large multinational company. Started by Bansilal in 1977 as

family business, is now a well-established company with annual sales turnover of 315 million. The core

manufacturing process of aerosols, which was a high speed, high volume process can be broadly

divided into two stages; making customized aerosol cans and then decorating these cans. Aerosols were

mostly used by cosmetics, perfume & pharma companies but due to the vagaries of the market; these

companies were forced to outsource the small runs to vendors like Pramanik. So Pramanik modified

itself with time and produced wide variety of products for different product segment.

Piyush Mehta, only son of Bansilal Mehta has just completed his MBA and is very keen to work with

his father. But on the very first day he has some bad experience. He came to know that, though there

customer are satisfied, there are many areas for improvement like record keeping, inventory

management and discipline & efficiency of employees. They had fabrication capacity of 48,000 units

per 8 hour shift and printing capacity of 1,44,000 units per 8 hour shift which is equivalent to one day’s

i.e. 3 shift’s fabrication capacity. Having such high manufacturing capacity, they still produced only

30,000 designed plates. Every day they got 60 orders, out of which 80% of orders were placed by

regular clients. Still every month 6-7 orders used to become emergency orders because their printing

plate was not found earlier and now new duplicate plates has to be made costing Rs.7,000 each plate.

Also, this mismanagement and no proper arrangement of plates lead to wastage to time, space and

money.

Aware of all these problems & situations in the plant, Bansilal has not taken any action because of his

conventional way of doing business. Also to save taxes, Bansilal have not shown profits since 1980.

Over dependency on his employees has also affected their efficiency and discipline, especially that of

Shankar, the head printer. After his evaluation, Piyush discussed the matter with his father but all in

vain. Bansilal is not that open to new ideas of Piyush as he considers them fancy theories which make

no sense.

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

Inefficient printing plates management.

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OBJECTIVES:

In order of their importance

1. Work efficiently

2. Maintaining or improving quality

3. Bringing down the total manufacturing cost

4. Grow business and to be in top 100 companies of India

5. Gaining control over employees.

OPTIONS:

i) Excel Sheet could be used in place of registers, one excel sheet for each company with their

code and printing plate’s information.

ii) Separating the plates of regular clients and other clients.

iii) Disposing off plates of non-regular clients whose chances of giving order again are very less.

iv) ERP System

EVALUATION OF OPTIONS:

1. Excel workbook would reduce the cost of registers, will save time and avoid confusion

and time required to find a plate. But we need an expert to handle that.

2. Separating the plates will make it easier to find plates as 80% of orders are from these

15 regular clients. But this separation will take a lot of time. Also out of every 60 orders

of day, 30 require new plate designs.

3. This will save the space and the confusion as no extra plate will be there. But sorting out

the plates of non-regular customers can be time consuming and confusing in itself as we

can’t be sure of companies that whether they will place an order in future or not.

4. All in one ERP system is the absolute solution but the only problem with it is the huge

amount of investment which company cannot afford presently.

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RECOMMENDATION:

Short Term: Short term decision can be separating the plates according to usage i.e. plates of regular customers and plates of non-regular customers.

Long Term: All in one ERP system is the only solution for long term. Company should start saving

funds for that.

ACTION PLAN:

Company should make sure that there’s no time killing during working hours. Try to reduce total

manufacturing cost. Start keeping the plates of regular clients in separate place as they will be less in

number. Whenever an order comes from regular client, after using plate keep it in separate place. Also

start saving money for the ultimate solution, the ERP system.

CONTINGENCY PLAN:

If Bansilal rejects the above solution, then use of excel files for keeping record instead of using

registers can be considered.

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Report Exhibit 1:

Fabrication Capacity = No. of cans made per minute*60(for one hour)*No. of hours in a shift*No. of

shifts*No. of Machines = 25*60*8*3*4 = 144000

Printing Capacity = No. of cans printed per minute*60(for one hour)*No. of hours in a shift*No. of

shifts = 300*60*8*3 = 432000

So, it shows our printing capacity is thrice of our fabrication capacity. So it can complete a day’s work

in 1 shift.

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UNDERTAKING:

To Whom It May Concern:

I, Jayant Kushwaha, hereby declare that this assignment is my original work and is not copied from

anyone/anywhere. If found similar with sources, I shall take complete responsibility of action taken

thereof by, WAC team.

Signature

NAME: Jayant Kushwaha

ROLL NO: 141119

SECTION: A

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