CEAT wins honours for Lanka in Total Quality Management

CEAT Sri Lanka achieved rare distinction recently when the company won second place at the Best TQM (Total Quality Management) Team awards of its parent company, the RPG Group, one of India's largest diversified conglomerates.

The success achieved in fabric scrap reduction by an eight member Cross Functional Team (CFT) at CEAT Sri Lanka was the basis for the Merit Award at the annual competition conducted by the Corporate Quality Centre of RPG Enterprises. Eighteen teams from 18 of the 20 companies in the RPG Group competed this year.

"We are greatly encouraged by this award," said CEAT Sri Lanka Managing Director Oscar Braganza, "because it represents the efforts of our people, and secondly because we beat teams from several much larger companies in the group."

He said this was the first time that a CFT from CEAT Sri Lanka participated in the competition.

CEAT's Cross Functional Team had undertaken a project to reduce fabric scrap to 0.55 per cent, but beat the goal and achieved .49 per cent, a result that generated a substantial saving for the company.

The first place at this year's competition went to PCBL, an RPG company specialising in the manufacture of Carbon Black.

The RPG Group's Best TQM Team Award (RPG-BTT) was instituted in 2002 and recognises improvement teams which record outstanding results through a structured problem solving approach. Each company in the Group is permitted to nominate up to three teams.

An ISO 9001:2000 certified company, CEAT Sri Lanka is the market leader for commercial vehicle tyres in Sri Lanka. The company's plants at Kalutara and Kelaniya manufacture an extensive range of tyres for light trucks, trucks, buses, forklifts and heavy vehicles such as payloaders, graders and backhoe loaders.

In late 2006, CEAT Sri Lanka invested Rs 350 million to set up the country's only radial tyre plant, and has already secured a significant share of the domestic market for these tyres and also received export orders of note. In the commercial tyre segment, the company has exported over 2600 container loads of tyres to date to India and 14 other countries.