To Infuse Kaizen in Trucking

                                     


        Trucks are loaded and unloaded across various states carrying the unique make of one manufacturer to another like colorful fabrics, simple yet important things like Incense and Kumkum etc. Transporting commodities to hundreds of miles away involves a lot of processes, techniques, labor and time.There are other ways to optimize the entire logistics like reducing the lead time, reducing the unloading-loading by using the equipments, applying the JIT, rooting out the causes of errors by using fish-bone method etc.

      Many a times we fail to give credit and attention to the trucks when it is the most important asset of all. Kaizen can be applied to the transport activities by using forklifts. Lean Management and Just-In-Time can be used in faster movement of load from different Hubs.

               For the safety of the driver and the people on the road, it is important that the organization provides a proper training to the drivers, marking operational zones and zero operations zone. Other important practice which is followed in most of the transport companies is that the tail lights of the trucks are replaced with LED lights. Due to inaccurate judgement of the driver, the tail lights are broken despite being protected with guards and other transparent material. The guards covering the lights tend to reduce the light transmission to the other vehicles on the road.The damage of tail lights is highly unsafe as it is not possible for the driver to communicate with the tailing vehicles causing accidents.

 The advantage of using LED lights against the traditional tail lights are as follows are that

1. One hit to the tail light destroys the entire bulb and it has to be replaced while in the case of  the LED lights which has multiple smaller bulbs even if the rear of the truck is damaged, they transmit light as they wont be fully damaged.

2. The brightness of the LED lights is 10 times more than the traditional lights. The best part about using these lights is that they are not expensive and have the same cost as the lights i.e. Rs. 250-300.

The effective functioning and the light transmission of the LED bulbs can be observed in the   attached video below

3. The maintenance department of Ghatge Patil Transports has saved over 2 hours of man power and     3 hours of Vehicle time.

4. The ground level employees and the drivers have claimed the usage of LED tail lights to be durable & maintenance-free apart from being safe for freight transportation.



     

              A regular truck has 6 cylinder liners which needs to be maintained. For the repair and replacement of such cylinder liners, machine press is used and another team is outsourced which leads to extra charges and time. To avoid such an expense, in-house chisel is manufactured by simple techniques like shaping the equipments and contracting it using ice. The internal repair and replacement work saves a lot of time in maintenance.
              The maintenance team of Ghatge Patil Transports has executed such an internal installation on 8 trucks. The cost savings for the time period of April 2016 to March 2017 is Rs 8400 for 5 vehicles and Rs. 3000 for April 17 to July 17 on 3 vehicles which comes upto Rs. 1000 per truck.

This was about the costing  but in terms of the time saved, 6 hours of the total time for vehicle is saved and 4 hours of Man hours are saved i.e. waiting time for the labour work to handle the replacement.


Do write us other ideas that are cost-effective and process-optimizing!

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