ISGEC Heavy Engineering Ltd. is a multi-product, multi-location public company that has been providing engineering solutions to customers across 91 countries for the past 90 years. As a company imbued with this spirit, what we perpetually strive for is excellence. Excellence in all we do, so that our clients may achieve excellence in all that they do.

Over 50 projects running at once

It’s normal for ISGEC to have over 50 projects going at any point in time. Each of these projects competes with all the others for resources. There are untold numbers of daunting tasks and challenges. Tracking over 100,000 parts coming from suppliers is one. Another is to see—and to grasp—what is happening inside each ongoing project to help nail down reliable delivery dates. Yet another is to have a predictable manufacturing process. With ISGEC’s level of production and complexity comes a constant flood of questions.

Which projects are in trouble? What’s the real ship date? Where in the system are things getting stuck? Will the parts we need arrive on time? Where and when should we intervene?

Answers are crucial to meeting customer demand and sustained growth. Until recently, the flood of questions was nearly impossible to answer. ISGEC had no way to see all the moving parts and processes that impacted various areas of their business. The only system they had in place told them only what had already happened. Which they already knew.

Recovered 70 days on a projected 100-day dela

From years of working in the trenches with clients, Realization teams know what executives and frontline managers at firms like ISGEC need to do to keep projects on track. Even in the kinds of sprawling, difficult, always-changing conditions that characterize daily life there. Our software helps focus our clients on what needs to be done right now, not on what has already happened. It provides re-alerts for executives, and actionable schedules for the frontline. Everyone, at every level, knows what to do next. It changes everything. One constant in the life of ISGEC was the last-minute surprise—a missing or late part, a specialized welder not available at a critical moment. The firm manufactures 50 - 60 presses in a year and the average cycle time from order to delivery is nine to ten months, depending on the size of the press. That’s a lot of time and opportunity for all kinds of things to go wrong. Everything that ISGEC builds depends on specialized labor, and on parts and materials coming from outside the company. A shortage of personnel or materials meant that things would get stuck. In business as in life, things got stuck.

To help solve some pressing issues, ISGEC brought in the team from Realization to work with 40 to 50 ISGEC staff members. The team was engaged to work with two divisions; the Machine Building Division (MBD) which makes presses for the automobile industry, and the Pressure Vessels Division (PVD) that makes heat exchangers, boilers, and reboilers for various industries.

"In FY 17-18, we had a very challenging target of an increase in output by 25%. It had been very heartening that with team Realization, our IT support team and our Operations team in MBD, we could meet the target of 25% increase in the throughput. Realization's system gave us alarms, flags, and escalation of issues on which we promptly acted. The visibility allowed us to work smarter by adopting out of the real-time box ideas to stay on the plan."

- Mr. Vivek Nigam, Business Head, ISGEC Heavy Engineering Ltd.

The world of projects at ISGEC was about to change. Streamliner helped by always looking ahead; and by identifying tasks to be tackled in the moment to maximize project progress and help recover delays. At one point, teams recovered 70 days on a projected 100-day delay

Problems aren’t always where you think

One significant obstacle at ISGEC was a long-held view. ISGEC believed their main challenge in the MBD division was to maximize output from every machine involved in production. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption to make.

But here’s what happened. The constraints in the operation weren’t where ISGEC thought they were. They were not in machining, but in the assembly space, where final assembly took place. (When an organization can only see delays that have happened, they often see constraints everywhere.) With Streamliner, the moment of truth had arrived. The ISGEC team could now focus on the few real constraints rather than the noise. Streamliner delivered true visibility into ISGEC’s operations.

Streamlining Operations and Empowering Proactive Management

Setting up Streamliner for ISGEC took only five months. The steps involved were system integration, working through business processes, setting up the software, and training ISGEC teams. The simplification that Streamliner brought to ISGEC was significant. Instead of constantly facing 250 traditional-plan tasks, the system streamlined all that down to 30-40 focus-and-finish tasks. Once that step was in place, the team could make use of the system’s project-level forward-looking alerts. Management could finally take pro-active steps. Streamliner predicted a capacity shortage in ISGEC’s assembly area six months in advance. Management planned ahead and worked out some of the assembly in situ and brought the portfolio back into control.

Streamliner's impact at ISGEC has been transformative. By simplifying tasks from hundreds down to a focused few, it has empowered proactive management. Predictive alerts enabled the team to address capacity shortages well in advance, bringing projects back on track. Unlike traditional systems, Streamliner prioritizes real-world needs over perfection, providing clarity on task priorities and resource constraints. It's revolutionizing project management for the better.

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