Introduction

Dewan Textile Mills Limited is one of the most modern textile mills in the country. This was the first textile mill of the group, which entered the group into the manufacturing sector of the country. The project, which was started in 1970 with a cost of Rs 20.5 million, has now grown to a size of Rs 800 million. The civil works of the project were completed in September 1971 and the installation of the machinery was started in June of the same year and completed in October. The trial production started in November 1971 and within a month, the unit went into commercial production. Now the production has reached a level of around 0.35 million meters of cloth per month using a capacity of more than 49 looms. The sales in 1999 exceeded Rs. 2.3 billion and are growing. The company has recently started its own power generation which will bring a substantial cost saving for the company. Dewan Textile Mills has two parallel manufacturing facilities; both located at Kotri near Hyderabad, in the province of Sindh, Pakistan. The raw material used is lint thread both of local origin and imported. The unit has applied the most modern technology in its facilities and has installed the latest model Swiss made yarn cleaner which ensures an extremely good quality of the cloth product. Another achievement was the installation of a computer controlled yarn classmate, which can check the quality of different counts directly on the production machines; thus the necessity of bringing the samples physically to the laboratory is eliminated. One of the basic strengths of the unit, indeed of the Group, is professionalized working atmosphere. This has resulted in the development of a high caliber and dedicated group of executives who are efficiently managing the operations of the project. The professional approach of the management also results in constant cost and efficiency appraisal, helping the company to maintain its competitive edge.

The Problem In our meeting with the production department, the problem the company was facing was discussed; apparently the production of their Textile unit was initially said to be 0.35 million meters of cloth on a monthly basis with 22 hrs operating daily. Management gave the production department a production target of 10,000 meters cloth monthly. However 2 months later it was discovered that the production target was being missed by 1500-1000 meters, as in the first month total production equaled 8600 meters and the second months production was 9000 meters. This puzzled the production team since the analyzed capacity of the machinery was said to be 12,000 meters of cloth/month. Hence they figured that the shortfall in production was caused by the wear and tear of the machinery as the unit has been there for a good 20 years this factor accounted for around 60% of the problem which may not be recovered. The second issue stated was the companys production methods; unit supervisor explained that movement of material through different practices of production might be the problem as the movement from one practice to the other could be causing delays in overall production; hence full production target was not being met. The production process is divided into four segments starting from reeling here threads which are raw materials for the unit are reeled onto on big reel which forwarded for further processes. The second process is dyeing up to 4-5 reels are put through the reel machine which marinates the thread with a concoction of chemicals in order to make the thread stable enough to be put on a loom. The third step looming here the reels are moved into a separate portion of the unit where they are mounted on the 100 looms present in the factory. We believe that the movement through these processes is the cause of the delays, between each process it takes between 30-45 minutes to transport the reels onto the other processes. The thread from each reel produces around 42.8 meters of cloth and the plant is processing around 7 reels on a daily basis which that is 275-300 meters daily which is around 8250-9000 meters monthly.

The tool Business Process Visual ARCHITECT - BPMN 2.0 ready business workflow design tool Fast and cross-platforms BPM tool which supports Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0, data flow diagram (DFD), and organization chart. Further to basic business modeling features, BP-VA supports specifying step-by-step working procedures to all business process elements, animating business process diagram, simulating business process diagram, generating reports and publishing project to website. Business Process Visual ARCHITECT Simulacian (BP-VA SN) supports all Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 diagrams. Further to basic business process modeling, BP-VA SN allows business analyst to procedure, animate to see how business process in action, simulate business process to optimize resources allocation and perform impact analysis of business process before modifying business process. BP-VA SN includes all features in analyst edition and modeler edition. Our emphasis was to analyze time management and use of additional resources, which the tool could simulate. Anything that could be the cause of these production shortfalls were kept in consideration, and above mentioned seem most prominent in this case. However there is always the aspect of environmental issues that may cause inefficiencies hence exact capacity might not be reached however problems of such mechanics are not considered in our case analysis.