Leading diamond company and De Beers Group sightholder, Ankit Gems Pvt. Ltd., has adopted a new approach in its business and operations to transform into a lean organization. To do this, it approached the RSM Astute Consulting through participation in government sponsored lean manufacturing program, reports add.

The implementation of the process towards a lean organization required a team of representatives from various process departments who were trained in lean tools including site tour of different industries having implemented lean tools successfully, reports suggest.

The company employs more than 600 people at its state-of-the-art modern diamond manufacturing factories in India and Namibia. The shift in approach came about with the desire to challenge its existing processes and bring further improvement in smooth flow of production, maintenance of work in process (WIP) inventory, production load balancing across some process departments, inventory turnaround time and also explore the scope for standardize action of process definitions and work practice guidelines, reports say.

The “5S” implementation required the re-organising of the work area to improve work and reduce waiting time and motion wastage. Also, the Pareto analysis and study of past trends, ways to overcome the factors leading to high proportion of damage or breakage, e-engineering the process flow for certain processes through Kaizen, were steps taken, reports say. The journey of success started with a significant cost saving during the first phase.