The Mould setting idea was invented by the Jewellery manufacturing team to increase productivity & quality and as well as reduce the lead time & Manufacturing cost.
Traditionally, jewellery manufacturing consists of two stages i.e Upstream and Downstream stages with the upstream is done through “Investment Casting route” and the Downstream consists of manual Processes. The upstream processes are mostly done through machines while the three downstream processes; Bench Working, Stone setting and Polishing are manual operations. The complexity of stone setting is higher than the other two operations and hence is the bottleneck operation for jewellery manufacturing. Developing this skill needs high level of training for a minimum of 1 year training and 1 year hands-on-experience. The capacity of the plant is restricted by the capacity of stone setting.
This innovation of mould setting was conceived in-house and was taken up for trials using internal resources without any external technical inputs. Through this process, the manual stone setting is eliminated and the stones are set in the rubber mould in the upstream stage itself. This de-skills the setting process and any person can do the setting with very little inputs and there is no specialized skill required for this purpose. By this, the bottleneck is eliminated and the capacity of the plant could be enhanced to the tune of 163% directly without any additional resource.
This has also resulted in reduction in employee fatigue and increased the employee motivation levels.
Mould setting process :
1. Instead of Silver master, Mould will be cut with finished proto product (with stones)
2. Stones will be kept in the rubber mould itself instead of setting in the Gold metal
3. Wax pieces will be moved to Casting after Tree making
4. After Casting, the semi finished products will be finished and polished.
The following problems were identified in Conventional process :
1. Downstream activity requires high skill – Manual Intervention
2. Stone setting requires the highest skill, and is a bottle neck operation in the flow
3. Capacity is restricted
4. Longer lead time
5. Variation in quality levels
6. Low employee morale due to monotonous / high skill job
Advantages of the Mould setting :
1. Stone setting process de-skilled by this invention.
2. No capacity constraint
3. Lead time reduced from four weeks to three weeks
4. Laymen can do this job where in the conventional process, high skilled technician required
5. Quality of the product will be increased when compared to the manual stone setting
6. Less Manufacturing cost