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CORPORATE DOSSIER

MANAGEMENT
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FROM PAGE1

QUALITY TIME

EXCELLENCE ON DEMAND
ple systems/processes for incremental growth," he says. Munjal's Head-Operations & Supply Chain Vikram Kasbekar, an IIT-Madras alumnus, recently localised the sheet in the welding process by working with a team from Tata Steel. The savings: Rs 100 per unit. "Now that our joint venture with Honda is over, our design team is developing IP in processes," says Kasbekar. Recently, instead of gear shaving (for getting a finished, high quality gear), a standard practice in the industry, the company has opted for a rolling operation, where there is no cutting. This ensures a Surinder Kapur 100% increase in productivity over the shaving process. Maruti is implementing Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) for minimising defects and has trained 200 people in the system. Instead of Japanese systems Singh follows the homegrown process quality mainCK tenance system "that gives consisTHINKSTO Rakesh Sinha tent results". He claims that the Japanese TPM system creates machine ownership conflict since some machines Meanwhile, Sunil Kant Munjal, Joint MD, Hero Moto- tend to be used by as many as three opCorp (earlier Hero Honda), is keeping a close watch on talent erators. "In our system, ownership is emerging out of the ISB's Munjal Global Manufacturing In- restricted to one person and we also stitute in Mohali. "The institute will focus on operational ex- have devised the maintenance softcellence, innovation and improvement of processes and the ware in-house," he says. Homegrown quality processes seem idea is not to focus on any one system but to learn from multiRaj Menon to be quite a rage among companies. Thermax has been using what it calls the Thermax Operating System (TOS) since 2004. "We introduced TOS because the company has multiple products and divisions, and it covers the entire business spectrum," says managing director MS Unnikrishnan. If the engineering solutions Sarita Nagpal provider prides itself on an in-house quality maintenance process, the turbine-to-sugar maker Triveni Group has shown ingenuity in the production of steam turbines. Over the last three years, it has managed to design a set of steam turbines with 100% homegrown design. "This is one of the reasons GE accepted us as their partner (to manufacture steam turRaghavendra Rao bines with more than 30 MW capacity)," says Triveni CMD Dhruv Sawhney, adding design efficiency is an outcome of quality maintenance. So is vendor management. Thermax maintains a central vendor management system. Unnikrishnan says that the evaluation of 9,000 acSaideep Rathnam tive vendors is done annually and the ones that score well get the bulk of the orders. The evaluation is done online on the basis of performance of component on delivery, its performance in the field and the time taken to deliver. Again, in Pune's Rs 8,600-crore Cummins India, the management has a webcast with its vendors each month. "Every quarter, we V Balasubramanian talk (with vendors) on how we see the business and give guidance on the next three months," says Raj Menon, COO, Cummins India. The emphasis is clearly on working collaboratively with 1,000-odd vendors to ensure zero defects. Vendor management skills, Manoj Sharma process innovation and working with a wider eco-system are changing the rules of quality management. "Today, it is not right to label India as a source of low-quality manufacturing. Things have changed in key sectors in the last 5-8 years. If speed and the ability to manufacture high volumes have worked in China's favour, the quality and quantity of skilled technical labour has worked in ours," contends Raghavendra Rao, VP-Manufacturing & Process Consulting Practice, South Asia and Middle East at Frost & Sullivan. The real challenge, however, remains the pace of implementation of new projects and high number of permissions required to do anything. Compared to India's more economically powerful neighbour, Rao says, "Global manufacturers are worried that if they take confidential product designs to China, they may be leaked and copied by local units. In India, there are no such fears. Secondly, India competes on the lean principle we don't manufacture in huge volumes, but focus on doing things at lower cost and getting it right the first time." If anything, Rao believes that India's problem is that it often 'innovates too much'. "Indian companies tend to question design intelligence. For example, the global machining standard for a particular component might be 20 microns. But Indian companies may feel that 25 microns will be good enough. They don't realise that doing so may affect the life and future performance of the component," he says. So how much is too much? India certainly needs to draw a line there. Hopefully, with more involvement than inspection, the country is in 'Q' to claim its rightful position in manufacturing.
With inputs from Priyanka Sangani & Nikhil Menon moinak.mitra@timesgroup.com

Devdutt Pattanaik

KING OF
THE WORLD
THE DESIRE TO DOMINATE PREVENTS US FROM BOWING DOWN, EVEN TO PERFECT LOGIC

Quality has always been a function of market demand. But it is also very much an intrinsic process nowadays. Take the case of Sundaram Brake Lining, where Srinivasan sits as the chairman. When the company decided not to use asbestos, a known pollutant, it went ahead despite costs spiraling. "It was the company's R&D department that came up with an innovative composition with zero-asbestos. Today, the non-asbestos composition is placed competitively with asbestos," says Venkatesh Balasubramanian, Assistant Professor, IIT-Madras, and the brain behind a quality management process called Rehabilitation Bio-engineering Group Risk Scale (RBGRS). The Anand Group, a major Maruti supplier, is implementing RBGRS at its Pune plant and Balasubramanian is helping out on ergonomic risk elimination, for instance. "How do you manufacture? How can process improvement be done through minimising human effort? How much strain does an operating engineer undergo when he works on a machine? All this is quantified and strain reduced. The RBG risk scale quantifies that," says Saideep Rathnam, President, Anand Group. By applying RBGRS, the wheel-end assembly of the plant's Salibsury Line (a type of design of one of its axels) has honed productivity by 65% - the cell layout shrunk by 56%, the movement by 57% and the weight borne by operators through the day by about 56%. The whole project took about six months to implement and Rathnam is hopeful of implementing RBGRS across all Anand Group companies.

n Jain mythology, Chakravarti means emperor of the world. Chakra means a wheel. It refers to the horizon, which is circular with us in the center. The Chakravarti rules all that his eyes can see. When he was made Chakravarti of the world, Bharata, eldest son of Rishabha, demanded that all his brothers bow to him. Rather than bow to him, they renounced the world. One brother, however, refused to bow or renounce. His name was Bahubali, the second son of Rishabha. Bharata declared war on Bahubali. To avoid unnecessary bloodshed, the elders recommended that the brothers should engage in series of duels to prove who was stronger. Bahubali turned out to be stronger than Bharata, but a point came when Bahubali had to raise his hand and strike Bharata on the head. The idea of striking his elder brother disgusted Bahubali; so he used his raised hand to pluck hair from own head instead, thus declaring his intention to be a monk. But as Bahubali had renounced the world after his younger brothers, he was a junior monk and was expected to bow to monks who had renounced earlier, his younger brothers included. Bahubali found this idea unacceptable. Surely younger brothers have to bow to elder brothers? But in the monastic order, the rules of seniority were different. Bahubali struggled, for it was not just about giving up things, it was about giving up the thought of domination. In the case of Bharata, the law said that the eldest shall be king. All knew this, yet his brothers preferred renouncing the world to bowing to him. In the case of Bahubali, he knew that being a monk involves renouncing the desire to dominate, and yet he found the idea of bowing to his younger brothers unacceptable. This is what happens in organisations. Rules are made using the most rational arguments or through consensus. The aim is to realise the vision, do the task or reach the target. Yet, it is a struggle to implement them. Few see that every structure and every rule, however fair they may be, come with their own power structure. And so we wonder why people find it difficult to simply follow the most rational of rules, or align to the process. We wonder why people yearn to be creative or drag their feet or demand motivation, despite being compensated. It stems from our animal desire to dominate, our rejection of any attempt to dominate us. When Rahul joined as the assistant manager of a shipping firm, he was told two people, Jaydev and Cyrus, would report to him. Jaydev and Cyrus were senior by many years and they found the idea of Rahul signing their appraisal forms unacceptable. Rahul did not see what the problem was; surely the system had to be respected. Like Bahubali, he realised the problem when he was asked to report to the owner's son, Pinaki, who though senior in years, was neither as qualified or as smart as him. Jaydev and Cyrus could not handle reporting to a younger man. Rahul could not handle reporting to a man he thought less smart than him. Both had to struggle between the desire to dominate and the rules of domestication.
[ The author is the Chief Belief Officer of the Future Group. He can be reached at devdutt@devdutt.com]

FROM PAGE1

FROM GREED TO GOOD

FAITH AND FOLLY

What is the explanation for that? The explanation is that employers in time of crisis are reluctant to employ women on the basis of the gendered stereotype around women as potential child bearers. We are going back to a very outmoded idea of women where employers are increasingly seen to be behaving along the lines, we hire a woman, then they shall get married and then they shall get pregnant, and have kids, and then not work. So we will take a man, which is a very depressing situation to be in the twenty first century. You wrote in the past, 'The board - remains a chauvinist's dream. For every hundred men who are non- executive directors of UK companies, there are only 11 women.' Why is that the case? How can the situation be changed? In countries like Spain, Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, where they have put in legislation requiring women at the highest level in the boards, we see progress. But if we allow the situation to naturally evolve, there will be little progress. It is just that the way the people are picked for the top corporate jobs or for these political jobs. Businesses are 90+ percent run by men who, when they need someone, will ask someone in their personal network. If you are a woman, you are unlikely to be a part of this 'old boys network'. So that's why I am a real advocate for actually having some sort of mandatory change where women have an opportunity for sitting at the table. You say that doing the right thing is good for business. But that is not often the case. The current financial crisis is a case in point here... I have been studying this area for the past 15 years. In some industries and sectors, corporations are realising that it pays to do the socially or environmentally right thing. It pays, because their customers want it. Companies like GAP and Nike found out that their customers did not want to buy clothes if they were made in sweatshops. When Wal-Mart looked at its environmental footprint and set about addressing this, it actually made $50million in savings that year. There are sweet spots, essentially, where it is in the business's interest to behave along environmental and ethical lines. So when PepsiCo reconfigures its strategy that is now 'profit with purpose' and has a whole host of indicators along nutritional and environmental lines, other companies in that sector take note and follow suit. So what went wrong with banking then? Investment banking is business-to-business and not consumer-focused. So it doesn't face the kind of pressures that a retailer has, where people can picket outside the front door with placards. Investment banking faced no such threats and hence it was business as usual for a long time. And because these banks have revolving doors with politics in many countries, a top banker could retire and enter government, while people from government would enter banking after their political careers. So this kind of cosy situation led to the whole industry being left to do as it pleased. Because we were in a growth period, nobody really noticed or looked at what they were doing or even asked what they were doing. And one of the consequences of the financial crisis has been that this whole industry has been laid bare.
vivek.kaul@timesgroup.com

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