Colony Textile Mills Essay

History Colony Group is one of the leading and oldest Textile Manufacturing group in Pakistan. The 1st industrial venture of the group was in cotton ginning sector back in 1881. Gradually the group diversified in to flour milling in the early 1900s. First textile spinning plant was put up in 1946 under the name of Colony Textile Mills Limited. The Group further ventured in to Banking, Insurance, Cement, and Power Generation & Distribution. By 1952 Colony Textile Mills Limited was a composite textile plant with a 120,000 spindles, 1,500 looms, and fabric finishing capacity in excess of 150,000 meters per day. Nationalization of 1972 took most of the business away, leaving Textile and Insurance in the Group. Presently, there are two companies in the group, namely, Colony Textile Mills Limited (CTM) with about 195,000 Spindles, and Colony Industries (Pvt. ) Limited (CIL), consisting of 35,000 Spindles and 418 Air Jet Looms. Width | Looms| | 190cm| 180| 176 Cam +12 Dobby + 12 Crank (20 Looms with Batchers)|210cm| 24| 24 Cam Looms (4 Looms with Batchers)| 280cm| 26| 20 Cam + 6 Dobby| 340cm| 188| 174 Cam + 14 Dobby| Competitive Dimensions CIL is a very strong and only group that has 418 Looms in same place. This helps in fulfilment of large orders at high speed. If the looms are installed at different locations large orders cannot be processed because of factors like communication barrier and increased cost of transportation etc. Another unique thing CIL has is the Automatic Drawing in machine. When order of new quality is received it needs to be designed for the loom to work on. If manually this process is done the time required to feed the new design in the loom would be around 16 hours. The time CIL takes to do the same task is just 2 hours with better efficiency. This automated machine is only available at CIL and increases order fulfilment speed. The power requirement for the setup of 418 looms, compressor fleets and other support functions is 8MW. The cost of power i. e. electricity is reduced to a greater extent by manufacturing through its own power generation system which produces 10MW through Natural gas. Moreover for an uninterrupted supply of electricity CIL has its own grid station. Similarly CIL’s own compressors fleet decreases the cost of raw material i. e. compressed air which prevents the machinery from heating up and maintain humidity and temperatures. Capacity Capacity or the production of looms greatly depends upon the quality of fabric. If fabric is of high quality production will be less. The reason behind this is high quality fabric uses fine threads. Production also depends upon the number of threads used in manufacturing. 6 million meters per month approx production has been recorded by CIL. Initially there were 120 looms at CIL. Capacity addition was done in March 2005 and 154 looms were added. Capacity addition for the 2nd time was done at the end of 3rd quarter by adding 144 looms making production capacity of 6. 0 million meters fabric per month. Core Services and Value Added Services The core service of CIL is grey fabric manufacturing. They don’t provide internal information of accounts, operations etc. to external people. However they provide samples to their clients which are sales support. Field support is also not easy in this weaving business but they do rectify the error within the specified time. Fail Safing techniques Automated motion sensors Automated motion sensors stop the process of creeling, sizing and weaving whenever a thread breaks down or any error appears in the process. This prevents errors from increasing. Online Inspection System Online Inspection system is a manual system by which errors can be checked by mills manager. The data is fed to the system by operators and is evaluated by mills manager for removal of errors. During Production Checks Technicians and operators are responsible for checking and removing the errors during production. After Production Checks Inspection and folding department rectifies error if it still exists before packing. After packing the order is randomly checked so that client gets error free order. Process Selection The type of processes they are using at the most basic level is Fabrication rocess that means Colony Industry converts their raw material i. e. raw yarn to grey fabric. Grey fabric is the form of fabric before printing or dying. This process of fabrication is termed as Weaving in the terminology of Textile business. Yarn flow is organized in the factory by process technology known as batch shop. Yarn is retrieved from yarn procurement department as the order is receive d for the production of grey fabric and then it is processed in the form of batches or order. Mill consists of 3 Units each having 2 Sheds which are control units. Hierarchy of authority is in Appendix. Each Unit is headed by Mills manger and so on. Production in charge are responsible for 60, senior technicians for 16 and Operators for 4-6 looms. Warping Creeling Quality Check Yarn High Spinning Mill Low Sizing Head Stock Warper Beams Drawing In Sizing Roll Inspection Bales Packaging Weaving Approve Pallets Disapprove Storage Treatable Treat Yes No Waste No Flow Chart Marketing department receives order and transfer production order to the mill. Mill staff plans the order and tells yarn procurement department for yarn purchase. This department purchases yarn from colony’s spinning mill and other spinning mills. The yarn is not stored at the mill but it is received from the source when needed. Once yarn is received by the mill it is sent to quality check department for inspection where yarn is weighed and tested for hair and tension. If the yarn is not approved, it is sent back to the source otherwise it is transferred to the next department. This yarn is in the form of spindles which is loaded on creeling machine manually. Then the process of warping starts in which these spindles are unrolled and rolled on the warping beams which are then transferred for sizing. In the process of sizing, starch and polyvinyl along with some other chemicals and water are cooked and applied to the yarn. This process makes yarn able to go through the next steps by increasing its strength and elasticity. After drying the yarn, ends are separated in a manner that they do not stick to each other. This dried yarn is rolled on temporary storage which has the size according to the width of the cloth known as sizing head stock. After the process of drawing in as explained previously, it is injected to the loom for the process of weaving. The temperature is controlled by a special system of compressor fleet. Once weaving is done, inspection of each inch of cloth is done for quality assurance where decision is made regarding acceptance, rejection and mending of cloth. After approval, it is sent for packing as mentioned in production order and if fabric is not approved, it is mended otherwise it is sent to the waste. Back Process: In Warping, the whole set-up is of Ben-Direct Benninger V 1080/2400. Colony Ind. has 6 Warping machines with the Creel Capacity of 1080 each. Each machine is with the electronic sensors for the tracing of broken ends. In Sizing, Colony has the Ben-Sizetech Zell KVE, Creel 32 WW/4000 machines. Colony has 4 Sizing machines, 3 with the Head Stock size of 4 meters. Total Creel Capacity ranges from 16 (1 m/c) to 28 (1 m/c) till 32 (2 m/c’s). The Sizing machine is with pre-wet technology with double dip sow-box. Colony has an additional facility of Beam Stacker which is not found anywhere else in Pakistan. Colony is equipped with 2 Beam Stacker from Formia Nova of Italy with total of 65 bars holding the capacity of 195 no of beams for Narrow & 130 no of beams for Wider. DRAWING-IN Colony has the state of the art 2 Automatic Drawing-In machine which is found rare in Pakistan. One machine is from Staubli (Delta 110-4) which has the capacity of 150,000 ends/day filling with the speed of 140 threads/min. The 2nd machine is from EL&M S. P. A (Super Vega) which has the 80 threads/min filling speed. Weaving Colony has the total production of 6. 00 million meters fabric/month with 418 looms all of Toyota JAT 710 in production. In the 190 cm section (Narrow looms), they have 180 looms, 24 with the batching motions. Folding machines has the total capacity of 25k/shift/machine. Rolling machine is with the production of 10000 meters fabric/shift/machine Quality Inspection/folding is the process for quality checks. In this process each inch of fabric is inspected. The quality of fabric depends upon the discretion of client and is checked according to the efficiency of loom stated in Production Order. Price also increases with the fineness of the fabric. During the process if any defect is found than it is decided according to the nature of the defect whether to allow it or treat the fabric. Then fabric is categorized into three grades A, B and C. A is finest category and is considered to be of export quality, while B and C are of lower quality. They follow 4 point system which allows maximum of 4 errors and is world wide accepted. Colony has fully equipped Quality Lab with all kind of testing equipments including the Uster Tester 4 for yarn checking. Quality Lab make sure that there is no compromise in the quality of the yarn used & the fabric produced. The whole set-up has the check points from Quality Department from Back Process to Article, from Inspection to packing, thus resulting in the production of 1st class A-Grade fabric as committed. Colony has the Wrapping Reel from Mesdan Italy with the Model # S-389 A used for the making of lea. It follows the ASTM standard ofD-1907-01. Auto Sorter is from Uster Switzerland with the Model PR 503 DR. Most Important machine in the Lab of colony is Uster UT -4 with the Model SE 400101-02100. Make of UT-4 is from Uster Switzerland for the checking of IPI’s in the yarn. For the checking of Hairiness in the yarn, colony has the Hairiness Tester from Zweigle Germany with the Model G-567. To check the Tear Strength of the fabric, colony has the Tear Strength Tester from Zweigle Germany with the model FX-3750. Their primary focus is quality because CIL is export based company. If quality is not up to the mark clients move to Bangladesh and China because they provide cheap products with low quality. Pakistani fabric is famous for its high quality and perfection. Recommendations: 1. Sales of local sector are dependent on few companies. The proportion of sales should be changed so that colony’s risk is minimized. This will also help in improving performance as it will result in sale increase. 2. Sale per order should be considered and goal should be â€Å"the more worth of order, higher should be the frequency of order. 3. Monitoring systems that allows online communication and control of looms should be installed to manage the system more accurately. 4. Employees should be decreased by bringing in automated creeling machine which reduces the time by automatically removing the spindles once the thread is removed from them. 5. Operations focus should be on wide looms as they have said that these wide looms have generated greater inflows. 6. Capacity addition should be kept in view as it has been around 3 years now before the last addition was made. 7. Training of employees by sending them to technical institutes abroad should be done as fail safing technique to reduce the chance of defect in the fabric. 8. Colony has fewer inflows in exports and greater in local therefore sales efforts should be engaged to increase local orders and increase inflows from exports. 9. Colony should use ingredient branding like they can market their cloth by informing clients about the brand of Looms Company have installed. 10. Operations policy should be made and reviewed continuously. Every employee should be involved in designing the policy. Appendix