My name is Indranil Ghosh and possess 10 years of experience in the metal-cutting industry in manufacturing, technical costing, and product information management.
In my current organization, I am working in the product management team, and I am responsible for product information on new products before product launch. Business problem- There was a conscious decision in our organization to stop recruiting new candidates/externals because of the pandemic situation. (Cost constraint) As a result, we saw the key projects regarding product information taking more time because usually we used to get this work done externally on a contract basis. Now both the regular production work and project work was handled by the same team members. Also now allocating time had become difficult as we were not used to this type of workload. So, our aim was now – proper work allocation, proper time utilization, and identifying resource(employee)threshold and potential. We were already having the data on the work area engagement of all team members. (that’s a regular practice in excel). I collected some more information (specific task, task description etc) along with the historical data for descriptive analysis. I used some basic python operations like group by (), str. contains (), sort values (), seaborn- cat-plot, count-plots for visualization, and Crosstab for creating tables with different combinations of attributes. I recommended the following points and clubbed them together as a new way of working:
- Prioritization of work areas was done as per the product launch deadlines
- Identification of technically good resources
- Allocation of resources matching their potential
- Periodizing project work in a particular time in a year for faster progress.
- Created a model (new way of working) with all these inputs and presented it to the management
Thus, the project deliveries improved by 17%, whereas the overall improvement was approximately 80% than before. Now we had more clarity about resource allocation. Everyone was more confident about their tasks. Project delivery improved (project tasks) We were able to bring down the time spent on less urgent tasks and utilize the same in prioritized project work and product launch tasks.
I am very happy to share that I received appreciation from the team and management for coming up with a simple and effective solution. Our customers were happy that we were able to find an effective solution and were confident about a long-term relationship with us.