TD Power Systems is a publicly traded supplier of large, customized AC generators with an output range of 1MW to 200MW, including steam turbines, hydro turbines, diesel engines, gas and wind turbines.
With a headcount of over 400, the company currently supplies 72 countries from four locations: Germany, India, US and Japan. Its main customers include GE, Siemens, Caterpillar and Andritz.
The company complies with ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015 and ISO 45001:2018 along with a variety of other, customer-specific requirements that come up on a project-to-project basis.
At the end of 2018, the company was growing at a steady pace and was on course to achieve almost $100m in revenues. As they scaled, it became increasingly challenging for their head of operations, Vasudev Murthy, to stay on top of his continuous improvement initiatives.
In particular, he was facing numerous problems with his quality, service and installation functions:
- Multiple different, disconnected systems being used to coordinate daily activities and record data. These included SAP, Ramco ERP, Siemens PLM, Excel, along with email and various unofficial chat tools.
- Major challenges ensuring accountability for process outcomes, especially when those processes involved different teams (eg corrective actions, engineering change requests).
- Uncertainty about who needed to do what, when and why on a daily basis, resulting in service requests and quality issues going unattended.
- Considerably management bandwidth needed to stay on top of the various repeatable processes in their quality, service and installation functions.
The result of this was his team were spending more than 5 hours a day coordinating and following up to achieve their goals and to deliver on time. Furthermore, there was evident increasing failure to deliver on time to their customers.