NEWSLETTER
ISSUE
Apr to Jun, 2021 Volume 14
EMPLOYEE'S SPEAK
I am working with Pharmalab as Manager SCM. By qualification, I have completed a doctorate in operation management after completing a Diploma, B.E and MBA in material management. I started my purchasing department career 20 years back, and I have associated with Pharmalab for the last nine years and six months. Initially, I was responsible for purchasing raw material, bought-out components, and many more from all over the globe. Later, I got an opportunity to shoulder additional responsibility to strengthen outsourcing, store, and logistics. It was a great experience and challenge to develop, maintain, and further strengthen with grooming an SCM team.
SCM is the profit centre of any company, which applies to Pharmalab as well. We are working on different strategies to control the cost, improving quality every year, on-time delivery, and service at the site. We are working as per ISO procedure, which starts from the vendor registration and ends with sample validation, keeping a long-term association with the vendors. While working with vendors, we keep in mind that the vendors should get training and all the necessary information regarding the criticality of the process, items, quality parameters, cost consciousness and achieve the set goal of delivery at the right time. In addition, the vendors are also made aware of the importance of documentation for better traceability, after-sales service, and other critical aspects.
We believe in keeping a long-term association with all the vendors. We have set a delivery benchmark by delivering all the material with an efficiency rate of 97%. This figure proves that most of the material has been delivered on time with the best quality. This benchmark is one of the achievements in Pharmalab and, for that matter, for any engineering company.
We are working on FIFO-LIFO and SCOR in Supply Chain Management which helps us to keep better traceability. We maintain the store in such a way that anyone (the third person) can find a material based on the location available in the system. It was a great challenge to maintain all the items in a limited space. We have three different locations to store material, right from raw material to main components and consumable items. Material is separately stored based on various categories and process, right from Hazard to non-Hazard, Inward to issue, Inspection to rejected, Free Issue to customer-supplier items and replacement to rework. We keep & maintain the inventory with an accuracy of 99%. This accuracy is again one of the benchmarks in Pharmalab and for any engineering company. We are keeping our close eyes on an Inventory to avoid stock-out by maintaining safety and minimum stock. With these efforts, we are saving a lot of costs which occur because of stock-out.
COVID-19 is one of the challenging situations where all the costing parameters have been affected badly. Starting from the fuel cost to logistic cost, raw material cost to labour cost, operation expenses to import cost and many more. Increasing fuel cost has affected domestic as well as international logistics cost. Absenteeism of labours affects the delivery which had been fulfilled by giving an additional cost to temporary labours. So, the increased labour cost has ultimately affected the profitability of the company. There are many challenges to balance this situation where we must have to maintain the cost and deliver quality material at the right time. In this situation, management has allowed us to take decisions to cater to all the requirement by any means. We had proved that we could make it happen by using a different kind of strategy. This situation teaches us many things which we are going to implement in our system. We intend to implement many things from IoT to traceability. We will implement Purchase order processing to Vendor performance, Vendor development to cost control and outsourcing activities, including raw material availability and its movement. We will develop a system to deliver maximum material within fewer working hours with a lower purchasing cost.
We have developed one of the logistics tools that help us budget the logistics cost for the whole year. We are going to upgrade tools for import purchase to get a landed cost of imported items. This tool will help us to calculate the estimation cost of imported items to propose for sales. We are working with the world’s top logistics partner, which helps us deliver the material on time in safe conditions with better traceability and at affordable rates. We also have domestic logistics partners capable of delivering the material by road, train, sea, and air at a more reasonable rate. We have a logistic partner to transport the material from our warehouse to the vendor’s warehouse in outsource activities. We are managing all the logistics activities so that transit time is never a bottleneck to deliver the material. In this way, we are controlling the cost, transit time with better traceability.
There are many more developments planned in coming years where our procedure, system, and team skill & work will become a benchmark for similar engineering companies. SCM team’s goal is to help the sales department get an order with competitive rates, better quality, and timely delivery. We are assisting a service department get a service from the supplier at the right time, and we are going to make it better by developing a system and skill of our team.
Chandrakant Prajapati
Manager – SCM
Pharmalab India Private Limited
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Contact:
Phone: +91 22 6622 9900
Email: mkt@pharmalab.com