Five disciplines of a seasonal appliance factory

Fans and coolers sell into a short, weather-dependent season, and the cost of meeting it shows up in places a sales forecast does not show. I plan the season backwards from the binding constraints: winding capacity, paint-line hours, test-booth throughput and the number of trained operators we can genuinely field. Where that capacity falls short of the peak, I compare three answers: building finished stock early, building semi-finished modules for late final assembly, or adding shifts. Each has a price. Early stock ties up working capital and risks the wrong model mix. Extra shifts raise injury and rework rates in ways our own records have shown. I put those costs side by side for the managing director and the chief financial officer, with warehousing, interest and markdown risk stated separately rather than averaged into a unit cost.

Our most serious hazards sit in the press shop, the powder-coating line and the winding and varnish area. I hold one standard for every person who operates a machine, whether employed by us or by a contractor: the same induction, the same authorisation badge and the same right to stop work. Guarding bypasses are logged electronically, and a bypass without a recorded reason is treated as an incident. I review the weekly safety record with plant heads before we discuss output. Compliance with the Factories Act and the state rules is the floor, and our safety and legal colleagues own it. My contribution is to make sure that rate standards, shift patterns and contractor terms do not quietly push people towards the shortcuts those rules exist to prevent. That is where most of our past incidents began.

Since star labelling for ceiling fans became mandatory in January 2023, a fan's rating has depended on its service value: the air it delivers for each watt it consumes. That figure is set in design but defended in production. A slightly heavier blade, a drift in winding resistance or a poorly balanced rotor can move a fan below its declared rating. With our engineering head, I put air-delivery and power checks on a sample from every shift and full electrical testing on every brushless motor. A rating claim is reviewed again whenever a material or supplier changes. The commercial team naturally wants higher-star models quickly. My responsibility is to make sure that what we print on the carton is what the fan actually does in a customer's hot room, three summers after purchase.

Bought materials account for about 61 per cent of our revenue: copper winding wire, cold-rolled and electrical steel, aluminium, plastics and, increasingly, electronic controller boards. Supplier quality taught me that unstable ordering creates a large share of supplier defects. We now give our main suppliers a rolling twelve-week schedule, link copper and steel prices to published indices with an agreed lag, and share the seasonal build plan every September. For controller boards, which a partner builds to our design, we co-own the test specification and hold a monthly joint failure-analysis review. I am cautious about dual sourcing every part for its own sake. A second source that has never produced at volume through an Indian summer offers comfort in a risk register, not a working alternative when demand doubles in six weeks.

Contract workers have long carried our seasonal peak, and in core processes that model has costs that never appear in the wage bill: shorter training, more rework and weaker ownership of safety. As the labour codes come into operation and state rules are settled, I am working with our HR and legal colleagues on which roles should be permanent, which suit fixed-term employment and which genuinely belong with a contractor. Since 2024 we have moved 420 recurring winding and paint-line roles to direct employment, at an additional cost of about ₹6.8 crore a year. I describe these choices in operating terms, such as skills retained, first-pass yield and injury rates, and leave legal interpretation to qualified colleagues and advisers. The aim is a workforce designed around the work, not around the lowest headcount line.