* Hari Krishna Bandaru (Founder) – A multi faceted automation expert with over 30 years of vast industry experience in automation, electronics, hydraulics, pneumatics, mechanics, and design and development of various SPMs catering to defence technology and various other allied and innovative enterprises.

* Abhishek Bandaru – A bio-medical engineer with over 8 years of experience in frontline sales and marketing across several fields. His experience has taught him the importance of understanding customers, ethical practices, need- based solutions and most importantly the role of timely service, quality and availability.

* Udai Duvvuri – A premier B-school grad with a passion for innovation, he has over 10 years of experience as a BPM/BPR consultant at various MNCs with a brief stint in designing IT applications for investment banking firms. Having left his run-of-the-mill job to start something of his own, he now runs a management cum IT consulting firm, and assists other start-ups. His experience assisting other firms now includes new product development, go-to market strategy, investor relations and ensuring the growth of firms he is associated with.

Product : Polyurethane insulation couplers

Customer : Under NDA

Annual turnover : USD 40 million

Brief summary

This customer caters to the automobile industry, engaged in manufacturing of PU insulation coupler covers for leading automobile brands like Hero, Honda, Hyundai, Maruti Suzuki, etc. This industry works a 24 hr production cycle to churn out the required volumes, approx, 100,000 units a day. This involves a production phase where the couplers are produced via a series of moulds, etc., and finishing phase where the product needs to be evaluated and cut to specifications.

Constraints/challenges

1. Material handling and finishing – The PU product is very soft and malleable and could very easily deform and get rejected, hence skilled workers are required who need to be well trained. Once the production is complete the products go through a vigorous manual inspection and a 2-stage specific cutting and trimming process.

2. Skilled labour – The facility needs to run 24 hrs and must be on continuously as it involves huge heating and curing ovens that are always on, the labour involved is mostly women who undergo a stringent training process and need to repeat many motions endlessly to cater to high production volumes.

3. Work timings shifts and strikes – The production facility runs 24-hr shifts continuously churning up to 100,000 pieces in 2 shifts. As the inspection and trimming process is run by skilled women workers and they cannot participate in the night shift, this leads to a continuous backlash on fully finished products and frequent labour strikes proved devastating.

4. Work monotony and health issues – This line involves a continuous monotonous repetitive action at 2 second interval over the 8-10 hr shift, this leads to demotivation, stress and a condition called Carpal Tunnel Syndrome which is a neurology condition that affects the nervous system and leads to mild paralysis.

The solution

Fibonacci proposed a fully automated material handling, inspection and cutting system that could run 24-hr shifts without the need of any human interaction other than 1 semi-skilled system operator. The Fibonacci team had carefully studied the complete post production process, timings and the importance of each technique.

The team then designed a fully automated system that needed to mimic the motion, technique and dexterity of the human hand to carefully load, inspect and trim each piece. It designed a multi-functional highly accurate indexing system that was cable of churning out a finished product, complete with inspection, cutting, trimming and packaging at 1-second intervals.

Financial study proved that the customer could break even in 9 months by increasing their through-put, finish quality and also effectively replaced 36 skilled labourers with a fully automated system with one semi-skilled operator. The labour could now be employed into another production line.

The solution gave them the confidence to scale-up and introduce new products and also expand into other parts of the country simply by depending on automation.