The condom experience

Venkatachari Jagannathan
23 December 2003

The company is one of the world's largest condom manufacturers (1.5 billion pieces per year), meeting a sizeable portion of the global demand. In the domestic market it is the leader.

The company has secured all the global quality certifications — as many as 12 — prescribed for the product. Competition is not able to meet its cost as well as quality parameters and for sometime the industry saw many players coming in and going out.

Though condom manufacturers have to confirm to standards on account of regulations, over the years the norms have become stiffer. "Quality parameters have gone up by 10 times. For instance, the accepted quality level earlier (AQL) was 1.5 and has come down to 0.15 AQL," says Dr K Sivakumar, vice president (technical).

A condom is sent out to sale only when it passes the electronic tests for the absence of pinholes, its tensile and the burst volume pressure strengths. Despite all this Srinivasan was not satisfied with his bottomline bulge. He was bugged by-the low machine availability time at his two plants located at Chennai and Virudhunagar. Both are quite old ones. While all its saleable condoms meet the stringent norms, there were rejects that dragged down the profits.

The cascading effect was lower productivity and increased scrap. Curiously, TTK LIG fabricates its own machines and also supplies to its UK joint venture partner SSL International.

But TTK LIG's long list of quality certifications did not address the specific manufacturing conditions in a factory, yield improvements, waste reduction, machine conditions, elimination of machine breakdowns, operator morale in a holistic manner.