Illustrative scenario · Component manufacturer · People and machines
Overtime keeps rising. Are we short of people?
About ₹31 lakh a year of overtime is a maintenance problemIllustrative
Not a client. A worked example of the method, with stated assumptions and public benchmarks. No result is claimed.
The business
A family-run maker of machined parts. About ₹120 crore a year, two plants, around 400 workers on two shifts. Payroll and attendance run on a biometric system and Excel; maintenance is kept in machine logbooks; production in daily reports.
The owner's question
“Overtime keeps rising. Are we short of people?”
What's already in the records
- Attendance and overtime from the biometric system
- Payroll
- Machine logbooks with breakdowns and repairs
- Spare-parts purchases in Tally
- Daily production reports
- The rejection register
What I'd join
- Overtime hours by line and week, against breakdowns logged on that line. This shows whether overtime follows the machines rather than the order book.
- Breakdowns by machine and cause, against spare-parts purchases and repair bills. This shows which machines fail repeatedly, and what they cost.
- Attendance by shift and month, against output. This shows absence patterns, for example around festivals and harvests, that planning could absorb.
- Who runs which changeovers and repairs. This shows one person everything depends on.
What it could show, worked through
The cost of overtime. At an assumed average wage of ₹20,000 a month, 400 workers each doing 10 hours of overtime a month at twice the ordinary rate costs about ₹92 lakh a year. If a third of it follows breakdowns, about ₹31 lakh a year is a maintenance problem, not a people problem.
about ₹31 lakh a year is a maintenance problem
What recording alone can do. In a randomised study of Indian textile mills, recording breakdown reasons, defects and stock daily, and reviewing them, cut defects by 43%, cut inventory by 22% and raised productivity by about 17% (Bloom and others, 2013). That was one rigorous study with intensive support: possible, not typical.
defects down 43%, in one study
Why it isn't obvious
HR sees overtime, maintenance sees breakdowns, and accounts sees spares. The connection exists only when the three are joined.
The decisions it opens
- Planned maintenance on the machines that fail most.
- Hire or train a second person for the critical changeovers.
- Plan staffing around the absence calendar, not against it.
What you'd get
- Diagnostic: overtime explained by cause, and machines ranked by failure cost.
- Sprint: a maintenance plan built from your own logbooks.
- Build and hand over: a weekly plant report combining attendance, breakdowns and output.
Sources
- Bloom, Eifert, Mahajan, McKenzie and Roberts, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2013.
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