My Journey As A Consultant - 24

 Assignments across various Industries adapting same concepts

During the course of my journey, I got an opportunity to work across various types of industries and corporates, large and medium, multinational and Indian, different types of industries encompassing various sectors. When I look back I also notice that I never repeated an assignment in the same industry or sector again. Every assignment was the first time in that industry and in the process we created some new benchmarks for that sector or industry to adopt when we successfully implemented our change initiative. Moreover, as the technology was evolving we used emerging technology for the first time in our assignments and found an excellent ally in the Herald Logic Technology team rising to our requirements smartly. Implementation was also speeded up due to this. 

Another interesting development was that we realised that we could use all the three concepts mentioned earlier namely BPR, Lean and TOC creatively in each assignment based on the needs and situation we came across. We didn't pitch ourselves as experts in any specific concept like most other boutique consultants did nor did we flaunt any certificate from any third party for offering our expertise in adapting these concepts. It was I believe the real USP in our approach and we found we got some of our assignments because of this uniqueness. I will share many cases as I move along with my narration of the journey.

Zuari Industries: 

This company was incorporated in 1967 as Zuari Agro Chemicals Ltd. It set up its first fertilizer plant in Goa in 1973 with the manufacture of Urea and added NPK in 1975 and DAP in 1984. My friend from Hyderabad, Mr Vijay Shankar, who was earlier working for Nagarjuna Fertilizers in Hyderabad, had moved on to this company around 2001 as head of Finance and he had indicated when we met him in Delhi where he was posted around 2002 that he foresaw a need for our kind of intervention in the fertiliser industry. He casually mentioned that when the time came he would let us know about possibilities in this company. Later he was moved to Goa to head the Finance function and around the end 2004 I got a call from Zuari Industries asking if we would be interested in pitching for an assignment for change management using Six Sigma as they were already in discussion with WIPRO who had a consulting team implementing Six Sigma for their clients. I promptly informed them that we are not exclusively focused on offering Six Sigma but our approach will take care of outcomes beyond what Six Sigma implementation would do and asked for a meeting with their top management team. We were invited to Goa for a 3-day interaction and discussion with the top and middle management team to share our perspectives based on these interactions.

Here a brief description of the fertiliser Industry in India will be useful to understand our approach. This industry receives heavy subsidies from the Government of India, to make sure farmers got fertilizers at a fixed low price across the country. Since the demand for fertilizers exists across the country, many fertiliser manufacturing units were set up across various geographies in the country primarily to produce Urea, which was subsidised. Each manufacturing plant was allotted by the government certain territory to cover in nearby states to keep the logistics cost under control while assuring supply. Most of these companies added NPK and DAP later as they were outside the purview of the subsidy and so they were free to market them on their own terms. To meet the shortfall in supply, sometimes the government allowed these companies to import fertilisers and distribute them in their territory. 

The government subsidy was based on the cost structure approved for each unit based on certain capacity utilisation factors and cost of logistics in their territory. The demand for fertilizer was seasonal, peaking during 3 months of monsoon, but the production was continuous throughout the year barring the annual maintenance shut down. Hence it became necessary for the manufacturer to maintain stocks at different locations based on expected demand during the lean period and move the stock around where there was demand during the peak period. Since forecasts are an uncertain activity, the actual demand never followed the forecast at the local level and the industry as a whole had to move stock around, causing additional costs affecting their profitability. Apart from this, the process of getting subsidy was varying from state to state and the paperwork and documentation was laborious, leading to high cost of operations. 

Zuari Industries also had another unique problem. They had no storage facility at their plant for finished fertilizer due to space constraint, but they had a railway siding where the railways allowed them to load on a daily basis their output which needed to be moved to their godowns located in other parts of their territory. This required planning with railways the rake requirements and route requirements on a daily basis, which is a very complex task since one had to work with a government agency on their own terms only. All these activities required a lot of manpower and paperwork adding to the cost of operations. 

Not surprisingly, Zuari had an IT department which had computerised these manual operations based on existing departmental and functional  working,  without addressing process simplification. The net result was that computerisation was only a record-keeping exercise post facto and the managers were crying hoarse that they were not getting any reports on time.

We identified that the first area of attention for them to be managing was the supply chain from the factory gate to the end consumer which is the farmer spread across their territories consisting of 3 states of Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka and a part of Andhra Pradesh. We proposed that, instead of a Six Sigma project as they wanted, we would do a BPR and Lean implementation in their supply chain management and made our proposal accordingly, providing for value pricing as a unique selling offer. Since they were comparing our offer against the offer from WIPRO which was a well-known company, we were not confident of getting the assignment since typical corporate managers tend to play safe and go for a well-known name in such cases. 

However, after a month of making our offer I got a call from the Materials Management chief saying that they had decided to go with us and asked me to come to Goa to finalise the contract while starting discussions with their marketing and distribution team. 

Giving the full details of what we did is beyond the scope of a blog but I would like to share some interesting highlights of this assignment. We found the CFT that we had formed taking only the front line employees as members was amazing in sharing insights on their current way of working and contributing to innovative ideas for the redesign process using the latest technology in mobile and online internet which was just emerging around 2004-2005 when we did this assignment. 

The top management team headed by then President Mr Raman Madhok were so impressed with the work done and the recommendations that they gave total support for a major IT implementation for which they got board approval for an additional budget  allocation.Subsequently, when we faced resistance to change from some of the senior field managers for implementing the redesigned process, they backed us completely and told the field managers that if they didn’t cooperate then serious consequences would follow. And, as mentioned before, Herald Logic came with a very good IT solution using their proprietary Intelli Radar and Intelli Push Technologies which took care of seamless process management of the supply chain in real time.

However, in the course of implementation, the company found that a large number of people had become surplus both in the back office and also in the field. In India, managements are unable to take the decision to let go of surplus people easily and humanitarian considerations play a role in re-deploying people where possible. Our approach in this matter was based on our first experience with Glaxo and later with Bakelite Hylam where we found that retraining and redeployment should  be attempted first and if that is not possible provide for a generous VRS package to help people financially while supporting them in any other ways to resettle in their lives. 

I did not follow up on this since, as we were completing our engagement, Mr Madhok retired and a new person took over as president in his place and I noticed that he was not showing the same enthusiasm for our work the way Mr Madhok did, and I felt that we would not have much scope for any future work from Zuari and moved on to other greener pastures.

Crompton Greaves Light Motor Division, Ahmednagar.

While working with Zuari Industries, during one of the visits, I was waiting to catch my return flight from Goa at the airport when I was greeted by my old classmate from IIM Bangalore, Mr S C Gupta, who was heading Crompton Greaves (CG) as Vice President of the company in charge of this division. I had bumped into him a few years earlier on my way to Bombay at the Pune railway station after a long time and, when he heard the kind of work I did, he promptly invited me to visit his unit at Ahmednagar. After my visit at that time, though he was convinced that my approach would help them, he couldn't go ahead as CG had taken up a major exercise in implementing a Japanese consultant’s approach to TQM and he said he would get back later. 

So when we met again at the Goa airport in 2005, he said he was looking for my business card but could not find it immediately with his secretary and was wondering how to contact me and now here I was! (I always wonder if there is some providence above us pushing us in the direction in which we need to go!) He promptly invited me to come to Ahmednagar at the earliest. 

We found the need to visit Mumbai later that month to attend the wedding of Herald Logic founder, Mr Vishal Gupta, and I arranged for us to be picked up from Mumbai by CG to visit Ahmednagar for two days of discussions with their top management team. Shortly after that, we finalized our assignment to implement a lean management program covering everything from their vendors to their customers and their factory operations for the entire light motor division.

The CG assignment showed that we had really arrived as consultants who were taken seriously based on our track record and we could get clients to commit a major assignment covering their complete operations. This was in contrast to the early days when we had to demonstrate the Proof Of Concept with a pilot project in a limited area before the organisation decided to go whole hog across the company. This happened later when we got an assignment from Dr Reddy’s lab, one of the largest pharma companies in india. I will discuss Dr Reddy’s case later.

At CG also, we were fortunate to have an excellent CFT from the front line operations and support staff personnel who  gave very good insights to the current way of working and the redesigned process. Needless to say, we had complete support from the top management team lead by the highly motivated Mr S C Gupta and we could get the whole organisation to come on board with the new way of working within a year of starting the assignment. We were even able to get many of their vendors to align their working to the pull-based supply chain management system we had introduced, thereby reducing or eliminating unnecessary inventories across the system. One of the major challenges the company had been facing was delivering customers’ orders on time. After the redesign, they were able to achieve on-time performance significantly. 

The details of the work done here are very technical and beyond the scope of a blog. I recently located and went through our final presentation made to CG and found that this was one assignment where we had truly implemented both BPR and Lean as a composite solution in a real-world situation and that justified our approach not to call ourselves as a specialist certified by others!!!

Dr Reddy’ Laboratories Ltd

My young associate I had mentioned earlier, Mr Rajan Mahendra, had worked with one of the smaller units associated with Dr Reddy’s Labs a few years earlier, helping them implement ISO 9001-2000 and also stabilised their processes. Mr G V Prasad of Dr Reddy’s Labs had engaged him then and remembered him when later he took over as Vice Chairman of Dr Reddy’s around mid-2005. When we were at Zuari, Goa, Rajan got a call from Mr Prasad asking him to meet him when he was back in Hyderabad. Shortly after that, we both met Mr Prasad at his office in Hyderabad and he shared a very interesting issue that they were facing. 

He said when Dr Reddy’s Lab was a relatively small and growing company they were able to launch many new products from concept to market in a year’s time whereas now, when they had grown very big with more than 10,000  employees and 12 divisions and global operations, they were struggling to launch a new product even after 5 years. Second, their formulations business in the Indian market was not growing despite having the largest sales force in the industry. Third, all decision-making was taking a lot of time going across various levels and functions, frustrating him and his team. Finally, he also said many of these issues had arisen despite their engaging and implementing many recommendations of Big Five consultants they had engaged over the years. So he decided to call us since he wanted Dr Reddy’s lab to behave like a small company while enjoying the power of a large company. 

Hearing this I realised that he was sharing our sales pitch even before we had said anything. So we shared with him the kind of work we were doing over the years and stressed that we could be of help only if he believed that boutique consultants like us could make a big difference to a large organisation like Dr Reddy’s, and he would need to back us up totally, irrespective of any resistance he may face as we went along.

We also told him that, instead of directly appointing us, we needed to get the buy-in of the company’s senior managers who would have to actually work with us. He immediately suggested we meet the senior marketing team for their formulations division selling in the Indian market. And he promptly arranged for us to meet them one by one in the next few days. 

During the meeting with the marketing team, I noticed that once they found out we had worked with Glaxo India earlier, they had no doubt about our ability to work with Dr Reddy’s. Further, since we were referred by their Vice Chairman for consideration, no one had any objection to engaging us, only a few questions for clarifications. I had always believed that for the kind of work we did at that time the only way we could enter any organisation was from the top and  if one had noticed from my narration of the journey it was always the CEO we approached first and if he got convinced then assignment was on. But we recognised that the CEO does not run the day-to-day work but people do and we needed to get them to buy in first before action took place on the ground.

Once the marketing team agreed to our coming in, we needed to finalise our assignment and we were directed to meet the head of HR and Admin at that time, Mr Saumen Chakraborty. Both Rajan and I knew him from his earlier days with Tecumseh India and we had no difficulty in getting our contracts finalised with his help. Once we started work with the marketing and sales team, Saumen gave us an additional contract to extend our work with other divisions so that they were ready to engage us when we completed our first project with Marketing. 

When I look back at what we achieved at Dr Reddy's lab for the sales and marketing operations, I feel very elated even now. This industry followed a set routine for more than 50 years in India in their deployment of their field staff called medical representatives (MR). The routine is so standardised across the industry that the work done by one MR is identical to work done by any other. The only difference was the product they were detailing and the promotional tools given to them. The rest of their operations from the Sales manager at the top to the MR in the field would be identical across this industry. 

And here we were assigned to bring about a radical change in their way of working. And we achieved it no doubt by getting them to question everything they were doing using the first principles of BPR that we shared with them. And true to our belief it is always the front line worker who knows what is the best process to follow but he is never allowed to share his views in the traditional hierarchical organisation -- and the pharma industry was very hierarchical indeed.

However, the CFT team here also rose to the occasion and, knowing that the Vice Chairman was really interested in implementing their redesign, came up with amazing ideas for a reengineered process using the latest technology in IT. They called it UNNATI  and gave the slogan to drive the project implementation. 

The pilot was run in 2005 and the complete roll-out was done in the next year across all the divisions. 15 years later, even today, Dr Reddy’s is following improved versions of Unnati in their sales operations and the rest of the industry has also adopted the practices. I met a senior sales manager from Sun Pharma after a few years of launching UNNATI in Dr Reddy's and he confirmed that even their company had adopted the UNNATI model for their field sales operations. I met a former Senior Consultant with IBM which had to implement the IT requirements for UNNATI as redesigned by us and he said that yes, he still remembers the briefing he got about UNNATI as a flagship project of Dr Reddy’s when they wanted to upgrade their IT infrastructure.

The success of UNNATI spurred Dr Reddy’s to take our help in completely revamping their supply chain and manufacturing operations. We succeeded in implementing Just In Time and Lean in these processes and showed that what was believed could happen only in discrete manufacturing could be adopted in batch process industries too. 

We were also engaged to work on reducing the new product launch cycle time but, due to the need to align more than 21 departmental heads to the requirements of this process, the implementation got stalled before we completed our contract. 

The above three cases showed that the basic concepts of change  management can be creatively adopted only if there is top management commitment and buy-in from the people who are  convinced that their ideas would be implemented.

My Journey As A Consultant - 23

 The Peaking of Multiple Assignments

Between 2002 and 2006 we started getting many assignments purely based on word of mouth and leveraging of our contacts. Whenever we got an opportunity, we would share our experiences with some known CEOs or senior managers of large corporations. As we were working on an assignment, we  would get a call from a prospective client based on a reference from an earlier client or from someone with whom we had shared our earlier experiences. 

At no point of time did we go around making speculative pitches or sales promotion drives. In fact, we did not even print any promo literature or catalogues or a packaged power point presentation marketing our services. What we had was a short PPT which highlighted the power of our approach to help clients focus on implementing change management concepts like BPR, Lean and TOC along with creative use of Information Technology where the ownership for the ideas rests with the people in the organisation and not that of a consultant. Along with that, the concept of Value Pricing which we used to convince the clients of our commitment to genuinely help them and stake our earnings to successful implementation became our unique selling proposition. 

So, with just one or two meetings in a short period of a couple of months, we would be starting our engagement with a new client. My young associate, Rajan Mahendra, egging me on to quickly get and finalise as many assignments as possible also motivated me to look for opportunity wherever possible and close the deal even when we were busy with existing work in hand. I shall narrate below more cases of our assignment across different industry categories in this period. 

Vasant Chemicals Pvt Ltd:

Rajan was associated with this old Hyderabad-based medium-sized company, manufacturing a single product DASDA (4-4’ diamino 2-2’ stilbenedisulfonic acid) , a popular optical brightener used in laundry detergents and other industrial applications. He had helped them get an ISO 9001-2000 certificate and the owner, Mr GKB Chowdary, was very impressed with his work. Rajan was sharing with him our association and the kind of work we were doing with other clients. Mr Chowdary was curious to know more about us and asked Rajan to arrange for him to meet all the three of us at his office. 

After our meeting, Mr Chowdary met up with one of our old clients, Mr RVS Ramakrishna, MD of ITW, and enquired about us. RVS gave him a strong reference about us and soon Vasant Chemicals signed a contract with us for implementing a change management programme for them. Unlike other corporate clients, this being an owner-managed company, Mr Chowdary got involved in the assignment right from the beginning in all aspects of our engagement, even sitting through the initial workshop sessions and participating in CFT meetings, which gave us additional inputs beyond what CFT members could gather.

The problem faced by the company at the time when we started our association was severe price competition from Chinese suppliers, affecting their market share. At one point they had a near monopoly of the Indian market and a large share of the global market for this product but over the last few years they were seeing erosion of their dominant position. Mr Chowdary felt that, unless some drastic changes were introduced in their operations, Vasant Chemicals would not survive for long. This was the real case for action for the company to take this project seriously and for his personal involvement.

Mr Chowdary was a lawyer by training and came from an agriculture family background and hence he was a first generation entrepreneur with no background in running a business or a manufacturing unit. He started a small unit to produce these chemicals and slowly expanded capacity as demand picked up and became a major player in this business over the next 20-odd years before we met him. Since he was totally involved in his business, he had thorough knowledge of all aspects of his operations which he shared with us during our meetings. Though the company made a single product, DASDA, they had many customers spread all over the world. Out of these, three customers were manufacturers of the optical whitening agents who were buying directly from the company; the rest of their customers were supplied through dealers and distributors located across the world. The three major customers constituted 75% of their business, out of which one of them was a large German company. It was imperative that they had to retain the share of their business at any cost to be in the business. So Vasant had built up capacity to produce DASDA in large quantities and stock it to supply to these three customers on priority while meeting the requirements of others through the distributors.

When we started looking at their operations, two important aspects caught our attention. Since Vasant had grown from small beginnings, when growth came they built up additional capacities in separate sheds located a small distance away from the original shed. Second, the manufacture of the product was a batch process and the various stages of manufacture were located in different sheds, necessitating back-and-forth movement of the intermediate stage work-in-process in mobile tankers in liquid form between the sheds. Moreover, this  manufacturing process also required strict adherence to pollution control laws at every stage, causing major logistic challenges. 

This was a very interesting assignment for us and, applying all the principles of BPR, Lean and TOC, we were able to come up with an innovative solution called STREET line manufacturing for a chemical batch process unit. Basically, we rearranged the operations of the facilities located in different sheds to follow a flow based on a despatch requirement plan for each major customer while dedicating three STREETS for the three major customers and the fourth STREET for the rest. This was achieved without moving any of the equipment from the existing sheds but moving the materials in such a way that they followed a specific street for a specific  customer. The net result was that we were able to get them to implement a Just-In-Time manufacturing system which was normally followed in a discrete engineering manufacturing organisation and made famous by Toyota Motor Company. This led to significant savings in cost of operations while reducing inventory levels across the line. Mr Chowdary was very happy with the results when we ran a few pilots and based on that renegotiated new contracts with his customers more favorable to both. 

While working on this assignment, Mr Chowdary mentioned a major manufacturing problem which had technical issues which they could not solve for the last 20 years and they had to go through some element of trial and error to manufacture it right at that stage. They had tried taking help from the best technology institutes around Hyderabad but could not address this problem. So I suggested that I could introduce him to my IIT Bombay Chemical engineering  professors using my alumni status and see if we could get a solution from them. He immediately agreed and asked me to set up a meeting at IIT Bombay with the professors and took me along for the meeting along with his technical team. IIT Bombay promptly assigned two young professors who had specialised in this area who solved the problem in a few months, stabilising the manufacturing process. Additionally, they also contracted with Vasant Chemicals to run an in-company training program for all the manufacturing and other technical staff to upgrade their knowledge and technology in the area of chemical engineering. 

Over a period, Mr Chowdary kept calling us whenever he had to take any major decision with regard to running his business beyond the area of our initial work.

Denison Hydraulics India Ltd.

This company is based in Hyderabad and was established by Mr V Janardhan Rao in the  mid-1970s. It is known for its products in the field of hydraulics and is the only manufacturer of Vane Pumps used in heavy duty applications like excavators and drilling rigs. Both Raghav Rao and I had known him over the years as a member of our Rotary Club and we occasionally used to exchange notes on our work with him. 

One day he called up Raghav and asked him to meet him in his office to discuss his business issues. During the meeting, Raghav suggested that to address his problems we needed to work with his team and he had to engage us over a period of time. He immediately agreed to hire us as consultants and contracted for a period of one year on a monthly retainer with 2 days of our time every week. This was a different type of contract in the sense that,  since the client was an old-timer and it was his own business, he found it convenient to hire us like he would hire any other consultant with fixed time and financial commitment!!

This was also another case of an owner-managed company, which had grown from small operations to a large-sized business unit. The main issue with the  unit was a large number of products in their manufacturing range with various specifications designed to meet various applications of industrial customers. We found they had more than 3,000  stock keeping units which ended up causing a huge pile up of inventories right from raw materials to finished products. Despite this, they were not able to supply any order in time. Classic problem of many engineering units! 

It was clear that we had to implement a Lean Manufacturing programme but the problem was not how to implement it but the owner’s fetish for secrecy. Mr Janardhan Rao’s concept of manufacturing was centred around the belief that every machine should always run to its full capacity and there is nothing wrong in building inventories as Work In Process. But our main problem was that these inventories were not aligned to the requirements of assembly to ship the finished products to customers on time and they had to suddenly stop producing something to make other components to meet an emergency despatch requirement. 

We found it very difficult to break this culture. One day, after we initiated a lean flow system in a line, we found a large  inventory of a component in front of a machine, which was not even scheduled. When we probed deeper, the worker and supervisor in that section would quietly confess that they got the order from MD to keep the machine running and give him direct production updates. This was happening very regularly and we had to confront Mr Rao with our findings and how his interfering was not going to help. He would say yes to us but could never resist his temptation to keep the machines running. After a few partial successes in some aspects of their operations, but generally getting frustrated with the owner's style of functioning and our inability to change him, we ended the year of our contract deciding not to continue our association with this company any more.

In this post, I have shared two cases of our experience with owner-managed companies and the contrasting styles of the owners, leading to great success in one while there was big disappointment in another. I will continue in my future post the remaining assignments we did with a few other corporates with varying degrees of success.

My Journey As A Consultant - 22

 Journey Continued with Varied Assignments

As I mentioned in the last post, after Rajan Mahendra joined our team, he pushed me to look for more assignments and we set a goal to start one new assignment every 3 months. This was based on our taking approximately 3 months to finalise a redesign for every new project, followed by implementation where our time commitment varied depending on the client and the type of work involved. Once the Herald Logic team got associated with the IT implementation, most of the work required their time in the early stages of implementation and we mostly got involved in coordination between them and the client. Later, at the time of roll out of the pilot and across the organisation, we got involved more to hand-hold them with early issues of change management. In these cases we were involved with the clients for more than a year or two. 

It was interesting to get associated with such work since it also widened our horizons to many aspects of management across the client organisation and we learned to guide the clients in dealing with the issues that arose with change management. We were learning on the job while helping our clients manage change!!!

In the remaining posts, I will share short summaries of each of the assignments we did in the period from 2002 till 2008.

Care Hospitals : 

One day, we got a call from my old client Natarajan of Saint Gobain Vetrotex asking us to meet his friend Mr Sanjay Arte, of GW Cap  (Now known as India Venture Fund), a venture capital fund focused on India. He had already briefed him about us. The background he gave was that GW Caps had recently (in 2002) invested in Care Hospitals in Hyderabad and Sanjay Arte was involved in managing this portfolio on behalf of GW Caps and they were guiding the management of the hospital to go for reengineering their processes. Originally Sanjay was toying with the idea of talking to one of the big five consultants (PWC) but Natarajan convinced him to talk to us when he interacted with him on this subject. This is a case of how a delighted customer gets you good business leads and promotes your business.

I met Sanjay a few days later when he came on his normal visit to Hyderabad to supervise Care Hospitals and, after a long discussion over lunch, he arranged for me to meet the then CEO Dr Krishna Reddy, who was one of the cardiologist-promoters along with other eminent cardiologists of Hyderabad, part of a team led by Dr Somaraju. Having worked with Apollo Hospitals earlier, I was able to convince Dr  Krishna Reddy about our credentials to work with Care Hospitals and we agreed to take up the first project in their Out Patient Department.(OPD)

At that time, Care Hospitals was located in only one premise near the old city area of Hyderabad where they had converted a four-star hotel into a hospital complex with 300 beds. All of the ground floor area was dedicated to the OPD, along with a pharmacy and some of the diagnostic facilities, while the other diagnostic services were located on the first floor. In Patient Departments along with patient care areas for inpatients were located in the upper floors. Care Hospitals was a multi-specialty hospital with state-of-the-art facilities in each of these areas for patient care. On an average, more than 500 patients were visiting the hospital daily, referred by other doctors or on their own from all over the state of Andhra Pradesh to meet the doctors in each of these areas. 

When we first visited the hospital we noticed that the hospital OPD areas were overflowing with patients and their attendants, as they waited for their appointments. Some of them were waiting for diagnostic reports and follow-up meetings with the doctors. The whole place looked like any government hospital or a railway station in India!! When we asked around, we were told that most of the patients would come in the morning and go back only by evening. In the earlier case of Apollo Hospitals where we had reengineered the diagnostic services, 80+% of those who had come in for diagnostic tests could get their reports and leave with just one 30minutes visit, whereas here they were stuck the whole day at the hospital. The reengineering goal was very clear. Reduce the total time taken by out-patients at the hospital from one full day to less than one hour. 

After the usual initial education workshop for all across the functions and levels including the doctors of the hospitals, the CFT worked with us and came  up with a redesign process which showed that it was possible to turn around a patient in OPD within 45 minutes including Registration at reception, initial consultation, diagnostic tests and reports, follow-up consultation post diagnostic report, and pharmacy dispensation. Of course, IT enablement was one of the key drivers and since no ready-made software was available they had to go for implementing a customized IT solution which took a long while since they decided to work with their regular IT vendor and Herald Logic was still not available for us to recommend at that time. But the management appreciated the simplicity of the process as proposed and committed to implement it without our further involvement. 

I had no interaction with the hospital subsequently, except when I had to get medical consultation over the next 10 years. In the meanwhile, Care Hospitals were growing into a major hospital chain across the country with 14 hospitals spread across various cities by 2013. This growth was funded by new Private Equity investors who came on board.   But after I had hung up my boots as a consultant in 2009, I got a call from Dr Krishna Reddy asking me to meet him. During the discussion that followed, he invited me to become their adviser and mentor a team of youngsters whom they had recruited to develop the business processes. I was very elated for 2 reasons. A client appreciated my contribution and remembered it even after 10 years to invite me as an adviser and, second, post-retirement I was not expecting any regular income and here he was offering me a retainer for a year for this role! 

GATI and Singer India Ltd:

One may wonder what is the link between GATI, which was in the logistics business, and Singer India which was into consumer durables. I had mentioned GATI as my client earlier when I was working with Datamatics Direct for Direct Mail advertising. I had got to know the top management team of GATI closely at that time and one day I got a call from them asking me if I could help develop a new business strategy for growing their business into the Logistic Service Provider (LSP) space they were planning to enter. 

I got associated with a short assignment developing this model for them and at the end of it they realised that our team could be of help to them in offering their service to their prospective clients, since we were offering innovative solutions through BPR to supply chain management and their LSP was part of this Supply Chain Management. So they got us involved in offering consultancy through GATI to their prospective clients for Supply Chain Management and, as part of implementation, they would provide logistic services along with IT enablement. Thus we got our first such assignment with Singer India. 

Singer India was an old company which was well-known all over the country for their sewing machines. But when we got associated, we  discovered that they were also getting other consumer durables from third parties and marketing them under the Singer brand name. By the time we got involved in this project, we realised that the company was going through major difficulties in the market place due to severe competition, along with their inability to change their methods to adapt to market needs. Anyway, we came up with a redesigned process with their CFT in the next 3 months and left it to GATI to take it on from there for implementation. 

But it is important to make one observation here. During our engagement, we noticed that the top management team was engaged in their own internal power struggles and that was getting reflected in the way the CFT members were responding to our guidance on this project. Moreover, whenever we asked the top management team to get involved in some aspect of our discussions they avoided joining. I realised that nothing would come up from this assignment beyond our paper recommendation. Later on, I got to know from GATI that they could not proceed with the implementation with Singer.

This was the only assignment that we got through another partner and we realised that this model was not good for our future, and we stopped pursuing that approach. 

Swanston Multiplex Cinemas Pvt Ltd.:

This company was one of the early promoters of multiplexes in India. They were promoted initially by the family of Shringar Films which were into distribution of Indian films across the country. GW CAP had invested as a venture fund into this business at the early stage and their first multiplex was called FAME ADLABS located at Andheri West near Oshiwara. Since Sanjay Arte had seen our work at Care Hospitals in Hyderabad, he introduced us to the promoters of this company and advised them to use our services to redesign a business process for this new company. For us this was a new experience in a field where there was no past experience to go by.

Multiplexes were part of a growing new business complex along with malls at that time. Mumbai was pioneering these, along with Delhi, and they were fast catching up in other cities too. In order to make a difference with our approach, we literally had to experience the processes involved and were really surprised at the complexity of managing a multiplex compared with a simple cinema theatre that we were used to till then. When we finalised our recommendation, it was not a reengineering project but more of a process document to manage a multiplex. Once the promoter saw the final report, he was worried that other multiplexes could easily get hold of a copy of this and replicate it for their use and he asked us to present the final version in parts so that no full document was available in one place!!!

Suddenly, between 2002 and 2003, we were getting involved in so many assignments of varied nature! This was adding to our experience and also improving our redesign efforts considerably in our subsequent work. I shall share these in my future posts.

My Journey As A Consultant - 21

 The Journey Moved On with Multiple Assignments

I mentioned Rajan Mahendra in my last post. While working on the Mangalore Chemicals and Fertilisers project, he came to my office-cum-residence one day and came up with a proposal. Being much younger, both by age and experience, he wanted to team up with me so that he could work on more assignments in the area of change management. He had initially started working with ISO 9000 implementation for his clients and slowly had moved on to the area of Total Quality Management. He felt that he needed a bigger canvas to work with and teaming up with my team would help him to do so. He told me I could aggressively look for more clients and he would provide the bandwidth to handle them. 

Till then, Raghav and I had followed a policy of looking for as many assignments at a time as we could handle, which usually was one or two at the most. And when travel was involved it was rarely more than one at a time. However, this, while giving us space to do a good job, also reduced our earning capacity. Now with Rajan’s proposal I felt that this limitation could be overcome. I set up a meeting with Raghav along with Rajan to discuss how to take this forward since it also involved how to share the revenue when we worked together. 

We agreed to the basic approach that, if all the three of us were involved in an assignment, the revenue would be split 3 ways, else only between the two who handled the assignment, keeping in mind capacity of the clients to pay. This was a convenient arrangement which immediately bore fruit and, from 2002 onwards, we were busy handling multiple assignments simultaneously. 

Since we had good experience in implementing concepts based on BPR, Lean Management and, in some cases, Theory Of Constraints, we were able to come up with more innovative solutions to each of the new assignments. We not only had clients from the traditional manufacturing businesses but also got clients from other emerging industries like corporate hospitals, multiplexes and malls, and services industries.

Around this time, I was approached by Dr Ramdas Ramakrishnan, whom I had known from his earlier stint with Tata Consultancy Services and BAAN Corporation, asking me to look at the software developed by Herald Logic, incubated at IIT Bombay. He had recently moved in there with an angel investment and also got involved with the management. Rajan accompanied me to IIT Bombay and, after spending 2 days with the young team which had developed the software named IntelliRadar and IntelliPush, we were convinced that this technology would help in speeding up the IT implementation aspect of our assignments. We quickly agreed to work with Herald Logic and made them our business partner for implementing IT solutions. The combination of Rajan joining our team, along with the Herald Logic tie-up, literally catapulted us into multiple assignments with much higher yields per assignment than before. More important was that earlier we were dependent on third-party vendors for this and had no control on their output or time lines. Now our team was taking full responsibility for even IT implementation and we could ask for and get higher billings for these services. 

In most of the assignments we were not doing anything which we had not done before. It was either a procurement process or supply chain management or sales process improvement. The contexts were different but the principles and outcomes were similar. To some extent, I started feeling a sense of boredom creeping in, having done this for long except that the IT implementation responsibility added some new excitement in each case. This was mainly because in India the IT scene was in a very early stage and the use of computers was not significantly deep-rooted and the available technology for networking was very expensive and just emerging. Smart phones were just making a beginning and we were coming up with ideas which required that all the current technology which most of us take for granted had to be sourced, procured and installed with significant outlay on IT systems by client organisations, and this had its own challenges.  

I will quickly run through the various clients and business situations we handled during this period from 2002 till 2008, after which a sudden turn of events around my health made me take the hard decision of hanging up my consultant boots.

ITW Signode Ltd.: 

This assignment was handled by Raghav and I before Rajan joined our team. Raghav had worked with this group earlier as a consultant to improve some manufacturing practices and he approached the then MD, RVS Ramakrishna (known as RVS by all), for a possible assignment. RVS invited us for lunch one day at a 5-star hotel and discussed our work and approach. He felt that, with the kind of changes ITW was going through, our approach to change management would be useful. He invited us to meet his top management team to finalise an engagement plan. ITW had manufacturing units at multiple locations in Hyderabad and also in Silvassa, a union territory near Vapi in Gujarat, apart from all-India sales and service operations. They wanted us to work on two of their units, the first located at Silvassa and the second located at Pashamylaram near Hyderabad. 

In terms of the type of work involved, the Silvassa unit had significant manufacturing related issues, apart from supply chain management. Being an MNC, ITW’s Indian operations were controlled by the Director for Asia and Pacific based out of Brussels, and he landed up to discuss the project and its various operational issues with us. He was very skeptical about our making a difference without his active involvement in the project, but RVS convinced him in our presence to let us do what we had to do and he could come to review the redesigned processes after 3 to 6 months, before start of implementation. 

Our work moved smoothly and we managed to finalise in three months a series of changes both in manufacturing practices and supply chain management from vendors to customers. As planned, the director from Brussels came over and we told the BPR CFT to make the presentation without our presence to show their own confidence in the redesign. We later learnt from RVS that the director was totally floored by the presentation and said that now he need not make as many visits as before since he was convinced the local team knew much more than what he could contribute!!!

 

After this, we were asked to help with the unit based in Pashamylaram which was in the business of making maintenance consumables for the engineering industry.  The manufacturing was very simple in that they were importing most of the chemicals in bulk from their parent units and repacking them into saleable stocks for supply to the Indian market. The assignment here was not much different from other supply chain management projects we had handled, but it involved aligning the imported supply with market pull. This had some logistics issues for which we could come up with a smart solution, since the parent company as primary vendor was more than willing to accommodate supply from their side to respond to local pull here. With this, after 9 months of association during which we had to work with the management to assist them in implementing the redesign, we moved on to our next assignment with other clients.

Saket Engineers Pvt. Ltd: 

This company was in the business of real estate development and they had promoted in 1997 a new housing project on the outskirts of Hyderabad. I was one of their early customers, having bought a small piece of land and built my house there and moved in around January 2000. I got to know the promoter and MD of this company, Mr T Radhakrishna, and he was keen on taking my help in scaling up his operations.

Around 2002, he asked if I could help him get an ISO 9001 - 2000 certification, since that would help him pitch his offering as quality certified. Till then, no real estate developer had obtained an ISO certificate and by and large the real estate industry had a stodgy reputation. Since Rajan had a strong background here, I agreed to help him along with Rajan and started work on it. Within 6 months, after a series of audits by an independent ISO certification agency, we managed to get ISO certification for the whole project, from marketing, sales, design to construction along with material procurement. This was a major achievement since Saket Engineers were the first in the industry to get one. 

While working on this assignment, Radhakrishna realised that the focus on process emphasised by the ISO certificate had to become a regular habit and asked us to help him make the various teams to consistently perform by guiding them on a day-to-day basis. At that time, both the sales team and the construction teams were struggling to sell and also finish the construction on time. So we decided to work with each of these teams separately and divided our work between them. I focused on the construction team and Rajan worked with the sales team. 

To give a perspective of the issues, the sales team had 25 members and was struggling to sell 5 units per month. The problem, however, was that they had a stock of nearly 800 plots to sell and at the rate they were going, they would take more than 12 years to sell this inventory. This was not acceptable. At the same time, the construction team also had 20 engineers and they could never complete a single house within the contracted period of 12 months for a two-storey Independent house, leading to cost overruns and other contractual issues with the customers. 

After we started hand-holding them, we were able to change the way the sales team worked from individual salesmen chasing their individual sales target to the team collectively working to achieve the sales goal of 25 units per month. Within 2 months, after we initiated major changes in the sales process, the sales team started closing sales for 20 to 25 units per month which reached to 30 to 40 units in the next 6 months. At the same time, working with the construction team, we were able to get them to reduce the construction time from 12 to 16 months to 6 months for a single-storey house and 8 months for a 2-storey house. At the end of one year, the turnover of the business shot up from Rs 9 crores to Rs 35 crores. The sales team was ahead of their targets by a huge margin and the construction team had completed and handed over 250 houses in one year. 

Saket Engineers continued to engage us for the next 5 years on and off while we moved on to other assignments. I have to mention that, over the years, I fully recovered the cost of my house in the form of fees from Saket Engineers. 😊

In the next post I will share the journey with other clients we worked with in the subsequent years.

My Journey As A Consultant - 20

 Organisation Culture Transformation In A Fertiliser Company

Till now most of my change management work that I had narrated earlier involved specific processes and part of the organisation around those processes. In this case of Mangalore Chemicals and Fertilizer Ltd, I got an opportunity to work in a company wide change management using concepts adopted from Japanese management techniques. In the process I also learnt new tools which can be used to facilitate organisational transformation.

I had mentioned K S Madhavan when he, as MD of Tecumseh, had hired us to work at their Ballabgarh Unit. Shortly after we ended our assignment, he retired from the company and decided to start a consulting practice under his own name, KS Madhavan and Associates (KSMA) and invited us to join him as his associates. Shortly after that, he informed us that Mangalore Chemicals and Fertilisers (MCF) had approached him to help them in implementing his approach which  brought about a major cultural change in Tecumseh’s Hyderabad unit after he took over as its MD. He told us that when he presented the Tecumseh success story  in a CII-sponsored seminar, the then MD of MCF, MR D P Mehta, who attended the seminar approached him after hearing his presentation, and sought his help. This was around the middle of 2000 when we were involved with ITCBPL.

KSMA put together a team of five consultants, including me, to work on this assignment.. This was the only assignment I did under the banner of KSMA and it was a great learning experience. One of Madhavan’s strengths was his mastery of Japanese management concepts and Edward De Bono's ideas of Six Thinking Hats and approach to creativity. He had used it in his work life to successfully turn around problem units and one of his major strengths was getting workers to participate actively in organisation transformation. He had in the past used these concepts as a manager where he had worked and this was the first time he had to use the same approach but in the role of a consultant. Since the canvas for this project was large, he wanted to have a team of consultants to assist him. 

To understand what we did, a background about MCF is in order. MCF was a unit of the government of Karnataka which was taken over by Mr Vijay Mallya in the early 1990s. It was till then a loss-making unit but after Mallya’s take-over it started turning the corner. Around 2000, the then MD realised that, in order for MCF to fully turn around, they had to go for radical organisation transformation. So when we started our interaction before giving a proposal, Madhavan had insisted that KSMA have to visit the plant and interact with its people across the organisation and also see for ourselves the state of affairs. MCF agreed and arranged for us to visit the unit over 2 days. During our discussions with a crosssection of personnel, and observations we made when we moved around the plant, we noticed  major issues emerging:

1. The plant was badly maintained and the general housekeeping all over the factory was very poor.

2. All the employees worked in functional silos and they had a high level of interpersonal conflicts and distrust.

3. They had large amounts of materials lying around everywhere in the factory and every department had many storage shelves overflowing with old files and materials stored and they were even indenting for additional space for storing.

4. Finally, the workers and labour unions had adversarial relations with the management and, due to various historical reasons, they were exploiting the weak management which had run the organisation before Mallya took over, and they continued the same even after that.

Based on this appraisal, KSMA proposed a four-pronged intervention. 

1. To streamline the use of space and materials and also get everyone involved in managing it, the Japanese tool of 5S was to be practiced by everyone from top management to the bottom-most workers.

2. To ensure that the plant ran without breakdowns and with most optimum efficiency, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) was  proposed as the second intervention.

3. To involve everyone across the organisation and to build trust and team-work culture, CFTs would be formed to address various problems which KSMA called as KRAs (Key Result Areas). This was designed more like a Kaizen exercise practised by Japanese management principles.

4. To involve the workers and get them to participate, Mr Madhavan introduced an innovative approach by getting one of the union leaders from Tecumseh, who had benefited from his approach, to work as a consultant in our team to interact with the workers and get them to come on board for this exercise.

Mr Madhavan and I led the KRAs, Rajan Mahendra, who was one of the other consultants, led the TPM exercise with support from one more consultant and Col Subramanian, who had worked with Mr Madhavan in Tecumseh to implement 5S, led the 5S project with help from the union leader to educate and implement the same with active worker participation. 

After conducting the initial round of workshops educating the top management right down to first-line engineers on the concepts and approaches of the above interventions, we got down to the actual work. 5S was taken up as a major initial project involving everyone across the company and, within a month of launching it, the results started showing in terms of organised space and release of unused shelf space and materials. Over the next 6 months, we estimated that they had recovered scrap which could be sold, and useful materials lying unaccounted for in the books,  worth a total of Rs 60 lakhs!!!. This by itself was more than the total fee KSMA was charging them for the complete assignment spread over 2 years!! 

In order to focus on the real problems for both TPM and KRA,  KSMA arranged for a structured exercise and collected a large number of symptoms being touted as problems by everyone. These were grouped into various categories of focused problem statements which became the basis for forming cross-functional teams. We created 12 teams working on various TPM projects across the plants and 20 teams working on the KRAs across the organisation. In the case of TPM, the teams mostly consisted of technical members along with procurement and finance, whereas, in the case of KRA-based problems, other departments were also involved. 

While the 5S exercise moved fast and started showing results quickly, the other two interventions took some time to take off. One of them was that, while we spent 3 days a week at the plant guiding the teams on the steps to be followed, they were supposed to work in their respective teams at least 2 hours per day on this project. We found that this did not always happen due to everyday crises or other priorities. Over time, however,  we managed to get over this hump and moved on. At the same time, a major labour problem was brewing and we had to intervene in this area also, based on Madhavan’s vast experience in that area and our own insights of ground reality gathered by then of the real issues and how to handle them differently from what they were used to. 

The net result was that some of the problems got addressed quickly while some had to wait for the labour trouble to be resolved before progress could be made. But something more interesting started happening, which was the original intention of this assignment. Culture Change. We noticed that, due to working as a team on various problems, the departmental and functional barriers started coming down. We found the team members sharing anecdotes about  how they started addressing routine day-to-day problems differently than before. 

For example, they had a culture called  “AAVI”, short for Avoid All Verbal Instructions. As a result, memos floated around without the actual problem getting addressed. Now the AAVI disappeared since the same people were working together in various CFTs and started addressing such issues quickly across functions. 

Similarly, we started getting feedback on many other previously divisive issues getting sorted out quickly. But while this was happening at the lower level, there were still walls between the senior management personnel who were not directly involved in any of the teams. So we came up with a couple of problem areas which had to be addressed by forming teams only among the senior management personnel and that took care of breaking the walls between them.

I was involved in the project between August 2000 for about a year. I believe we achieved one basic goal of this assignment: to bring about culture change and permanent improvements in many of the problem areas. The company also started performing better over a period and eventually MCF was taken over from the UB group by Zuari Fertilisers and Chemicals Ltd, an Adventz group company. From my personal point of view, I learnt a lot of new ideas and concepts from Madhavan on change management and the tools that can be adopted to deal with it, which I could use in my subsequent work with other clients. I also got to know Rajan Mahendra, who was 20 years younger than me, and we started working together in many subsequent assignments with very interesting results. I will share those in my future posts.

My Journey As a Consultant - 19

 Managing Change in a large Paperboard Mill

Pradeep Dhobale, MD of ITC Bhadrachalam Paperboards Ltd.: “I have a big challenge here. Every department and function has achieved its performance bonus. But the company as a whole has not achieved the financial goals. This is a big paradox. I want you guys to address this problem and help us achieve the corporate goals while achieving functional goals.”

Raghav and I had been interacting with ITC Bhadrachalam Paperboards Ltd (IBPL) since 1996 when we were  working with Glaxo. We had met one of their senior commercial managers on a flight between Bombay and Hyderabad. He was sharing his experience of attending a workshop on BPR recently and was wondering how he could implement those ideas in his function. We shared our experience with Glaxo and emphasised that BPR had to be implemented across all functions of the organization for it to work. 

He was sufficiently impressed with us to invite us to meet his boss, the VP Commercial, to discuss our approach. He in turn arranged for us to have a lunch meeting with his MD, Mr M P Malliwal at that  time, which led to our being invited to conduct a half-day workshop for 55 senior managers of IBPL  on BPR. This was around the end of 1996. Shortly after this, the company got busy with a major Rs. 600 crore project to upgrade their paperboard technology and told us they would get back later once this new project was established. 

Around this time, we were also introduced to Mr Pradeep Dhobale, who was heading the manufacturing operations at the factory in Bhadrachalam. During our meeting, I found out he was from IIT Bombay, a couple of batches junior to me, and we warmed up to our relationship quite well. We thought that this postponement may not lead to an early assignment and parked ITC Bhadrachalam at the back of our mind to be approached later. In the meanwhile, through our first contact in this company, we heard that Mr. Malliwal had retired and Pradeep Dhobale had taken over as the MD.

Towards the end of 1999, we got a call from Pradeep saying that they had invited many consultants like Price WaterHouse, Ernst and Young, KPMG, etc. for a presentation on Change Management to the top management of their company and he wanted us also to make a presentation of our approach and experience. We told him that we were not in the league of the big names he mentioned and, unlike them, we worked with the organisation team to implement BPR and not to give a report. How could we be compared with them? His response: “Look, we have decided to invite you both, so you have no choice but to make a presentation before we can decide on whom to engage.” So we agreed, as we had nothing to lose and everything to be gained, pitted against the Big Five global consultants!!!

We quickly prepared a powerpoint presentation, sharing the insights gained by us till then, working for a few organisations mentioned in the previous posts, and ended with a strong pitch for why we would make a difference to actual implementation with our approach. And we left it at that, knowing that in a large corporation the traditional wisdom of hiring a consultant was to go for a well-known name and play safe. Who would take the risk of hiring two relatively unknown guys with only some recent experience in India, whereas the Big Five came armed with their global experience? So we went back to our work with our clients, knowing we never stood a chance here.

To our astonishment, around March 2000, Raghav got an early morning call from Pradeep asking if we wanted to work with ITC Bhadrachalam and, if so, to drop in the same day at 11AM. This blew our mind, since we had totally given up hopes of any work with the company! 

We hurried to his office and met Pradeep at the agreed time and the first sentence from him was what I have quoted above. By this time, we had also got exposed to concepts of Lean Management and Theory of Constraints and we shared our perspectives on local optima and global optima and avoiding waste and aligning processes to customer needs. So, after a brief discussion, he arranged for us to meet the commercial team to finalise a contract and soon we started a major engagement with one of the big names in the Indian corporate world! We never really learned why we were chosen above the Big Five, but clearly Pradeep had put his head on the block with his belief in us.

Unlike our previous engagements, this assignment covered the complete supply chain from customers to factory to vendors. It was a big canvas and involved very complex operations from procuring to manufacturing to supply and payment collection. The details of this case would be a good case study in change management but, due to our Non-Disclosure Agreements with all our clients, I cannot go into the details here. I can, however, share some interesting insights which became a learning experience for us too.

On the market side, the company had both a strong dealer network who supplied to smaller customers as well as large customers who bought directly from the company. But even the large customers were relatively small players whose end customers were much bigger than them. For example, IBPL supplied high-quality paperboards to converters who made them into packaging materials to be supplied to large consumer products companies like Hindustan Lever, Colgate and many others. Apart from that, they also had their own internal customer in the form of the Paper Product  Division of ITC, which was the biggest cigarette manufacturer in the country, apart from many other agro products for which paper packaging boards were used. 

Traditionally, the paper mills worked on a model in which all customers had to give advance indents of their requirements and this would form the basis for production planning, manufacture and supply. However, as competition increased, the customers found that they had to make constant changes in their business plans and they wanted the paper mills to quickly respond to their changed needs, and this could not be fitted into the advance indent approach. This caused constant friction between the sales and manufacturing teams and we could experience this when our CFT met and there was constant conflict between team members from these two functions during our early deliberations. 

While the end customers were big names for the converters, IBPL as a supplier also was a big vendor on the other side and these customers felt they were getting squeezed between two large corporates. This caused a lot of resentment towards IBPL which was not visible to any one till we took our team to meet them to get first-hand feedback from the customers, which normally gets filtered out when it comes through the traditional sales and marketing team. The most interesting finding was that even those customers whom the company thought were very happy with them had a lot of complaints. This was a major turning point in our approach to come up with a reengineered process.

When the company had expanded their capacity in the factory with a new technology plant, they had also invested in sophisticated automatic computer controlled machinery for cutting paper rolls and a huge storage facility which was totally automated to keep stocks and dispatch to customers. They found that, while they had huge stocks, the orders came for special items due to market changes which were not available in stock and needed to be produced for immediate delivery. The paper cutting facility was also causing a bottleneck due to computerised planning and someone had quietly disconnected the computer so that they could respond manually to sudden changes in the manufacturing plans. 

The most important aspect was the IT system they were using. Only five years before we started our work, the company had invested in a large IT system which was a classic computerisation of their manual way of working. When the reengineering team took a look at the system, they  found that it needed to be completely overhauled to become a system which would be aligned to the BPR recommendations.

It took us six months to finalise the redesign and get it accepted by the management. To give full credit to the  top management team, they were very open-minded to understand the issues raised by the CFT and the redesign suggestions for all their processes. In fact, they went ahead with a decision to invest in a new IT system which would enable the smooth implementation of the BPR team’s recommendations. To their credit, they took charge of the implementation without much active involvement from our side. Our association with IBPL lasted for a year before we signed off, collecting our final payment. I met Pradeep Dhobale  after a couple of years on a flight from Hyderabad to Delhi, when he told me they had implemented most of the recommendations and invited us to come visit them to have a look at the results of our work. That was indeed a very satisfying moment in my life!