My Journey As A Consultant - 14

 An Early Opportunity to Work With Large Corporate

Right from the beginning when my association with Raghav Rao started, we were exploring possibilities for getting an opportunity to work with very large corporates in India, both Indian and MNC. We were making a list of all large corporates operating from Hyderabad which in our opinion could be approached for major change management and organizational transformation assignments using Business Process Reengineering. Many industry associations were organising workshops and seminars on the post-liberalisation challenges faced by many Industries across sectors and the buzz was on various ways to deal with them. Reengineering was talked about as a possible way out, but most of the case studies touted by large MNC consultants shared their experience with US and European companies where computers were used extensively and dedicated networks were available to individual organisations at high costs. The situation was not the same in India but some organisations were engaged in downsizing and resource optimisation exercises using Total Quality Management programmes which were popular across many large corporates. Still, the challenges posed by radical changes post-liberalisation were not getting addressed effectively and we felt this was the right time to approach large corporates using our unique business proposition that we as consultants are here not to advise and give a report but to work with the organisation to help adopt and implement the new  concepts. We also were hearing and reading many reports of large corporates engaging the Big Five MNC consultants; but after spending several crores of rupees on their fees, nothing had changed on the ground. 

As we were engaged with Hyderabad Batteries, Apollo Hospitals and Nagarjuna Finance assignments, Raghav one day mentioned that his close friend and classmate from IIM Ahmedabad, V Thyagarajan (Thyagi, as he liked to be called) had taken over as the MD of Glaxo India a year earlier and he had been in close touch with Raghav after he started on his own. In fact, he also mentioned that Thyagi had helped him get entry into a diamond export group, and he had been doing a lot of work with them particularly in the diamond polishing side of the business which was the backbone of this industry in India. I realised immediately that since Thyagi was a well-wisher of Raghav and working for an MNC where they had been exposed to concepts of what reengineering and change management are would be open to the idea of exploring how they could use boutique consultants like us for implementation of these concepts. Initially, we had our doubts whether a large corporate MNC would even look at two unknown consultants with no experience of having worked with large corporates; however, we decided we had nothing to lose in broaching this subject with Thyagi since he was Raghav’s good friend. After a few days, Raghav mentioned that Thyagi was visiting Hyderabad on a transit  stopover enroute to another city and he had half a day of free time and had agreed to meet us. I was very thrilled and said we have only one chance; if Thyagi could be convinced that our approach would work with Glaxo, then we could get a chance to discuss with his other senior colleagues who needed to come on board before we even got a chance to give a proposal. 

At the appointed time, we met Thyagi in the lobby of a five-star hotel where he had checked in as a transit passenger and shared with him the work we had done till then and now we were keen to work with large corporates like Glaxo where the possibilities for such work would be significantly huge. He was particularly impressed with our focus on implementation and shared their recent experience with a Big Five consultant where, after spending several lakhs of rupees, they had not yet implemented any of their recommendation since, as he put it, there was no ownership within the organisation to implement the proposals as it was felt by many that these were the consultant’s ideas and they would not work for them. After about 2 hours of discussions on various aspects of their business and our approach and knowledge of the subject, he said he would discuss with his senior colleagues when he got back, and set up a meeting with them where we would have to convince them to come on board. We knew that, unlike owner-managed companies, with  large corporations the decision making process involves consensus-building among key senior members of management and all of them had to come on board before any MD could take a decision. In the case of Glaxo, they had a Joint MD who was in charge of the change management programme which they had already initiated; they were in fact using a modified version of TQM with the help of another consultant who had specialised in TQM. So the first meeting had to be with the Joint MD and for that,when it was fixed, we would have to make a visit to Bombay for a day. We agreed and said we would wait for his call. This was towards the end of 1994, and, true to his word, after a month or so we got a call from Thyagi asking us to come to Bombay on a particular day in the following  week by 12 noon for a meeting at their corporate head office located at Worli. 

I had never owned a suit in my life till then. I was one of those maverick characters who believed that, as a consultant, wearing a suit would be intimidating to the people with whom we have to work. In India, barring top management people in very large corporations, wearing a suit is not common practice and with small and medium companies it was not required even when you met the owner-managers who were casually dressed. But Raghav said he had worked in large corporations and it was necessary that we wear proper suits for this first important meeting with the MD and Joint MD of Glaxo. For the sake of business, I took Raghav with me immediately to a nearby Raymond’s showroom and bought an all-purpose jacket which could be worn with any colour of trousers and the decision was taken in five minutes flat. Fortunately, I didn't have to go hunting for new shoes or ties since I had them and occasionally used them for formal events.

On the appointed time and day, we took the morning flight from Hyderabad to Bombay and reached the Worli headquarters of Glaxo. At the security, they had information about our visit so they quickly escorted us to the MD’s office. At 12 noon we were ushered into the MD’s room where both Thyagi and his Joint MD, Homi Khusrokhan were waiting for us. After preliminary introductions, Tyagi said they had booked a table for lunch at a nearby fancy restaurant so that we could discuss undisturbed over lunch. So we moved to the restaurant and, after taking our place at the reserved table, we started the discussion. Since Homi was the man in charge of this initiative, Thyagi left it to him to take the discussion lead so that he could get convinced about our competence to work for them. But we soon realised that Thyagi had already briefed Homi about us and our background and the meeting went on very smoothly. 

Originally, they had planned for spending an hour over lunch to discuss this subject but, as we started sharing our experiences and case studies that we had read up from published sources, we noticed that both Thyagi and Homi got more interested in knowing specific areas of problems on which they were seized with and the case studies were very similar to the situation they were facing. So they suggested that we continue the discussion in their office post lunch so that they get more insights from us before going further. 

We moved back to the MD’s office and they shared with us a major problem they were working on involving bill  payments. They had put together a top management team of 5 VPs from commercial, manufacturing, finance, human resources and computers to address this problem using the TQM approach they had recently learnt. They had recently sold one of their consumer products divisions and sitting on a pile of cash. But they could never pay any of their vendors on time. Most payments were delayed far beyond the due date, by several months in many cases, despite having 60 days credit, and some of the large vendors who were contract manufacturers used to call up the directors in the middle of the night expressing their difficulties in getting their payments affecting their cash flows.

They felt that, as a large MNC, it was bad for their image and on an urgent basis they had taken up this project on priority. 

Hammer and Champy in their book give 3 cases in the introduction of the book to show how BPR makes a dramatic difference for an organisation. One of the cases is of Ford Motor Company which was exactly similar to the situation faced by Glaxo at that time. I opened the book which I was always carrying with me and showed them that case and asked them to just read it saying it would take only a few minutes of their time. Both of them, after reading aloud said that this was exactly their situation and we said in that case we can help them with our approach of focusing on implementation. I also gave them a copy of the book as we normally did with our prospective clients and they immediately asked their secretaries to make copies of the Ford Motor Company's case study to be sent to the 5 VPs. They also told us that they were busy with one major project for the next 2 months and would call us after that so that we could take the idea forward. 

Both Raghav and I were quite elated that we had sold the idea to both the MD and Joint MD but we knew that we still needed to get the 5 VPs on board. So we requested  them to circulate additional copies of the book to all the VPs and discuss among themselves on adopting BPR after every one of them was on the same wavelength. We knew that all of them would read the book in one sitting and get excited about adopting BPR in their organisation. That would make it easy for us to finalise an engagement plan when we met next after two months. 

Exactly after 2 months, we got a call from the Joint MD’s office saying that we should plan to spend three days in Bombay the following week when they had scheduled for us to meet all the VPs and work on an engagement plan and finalise the contract. They also said that they had made arrangements for our stay at their Guest House at Malabar Hills and they would reimburse all the travel expenses for the visit.

So we were soon in Bombay, visiting the Glaxo headquarters, and when we reached the Joint MD’s office his secretary gave us a schedule of our meetings that they had set up with individual VPs on that day and next day. She also said that the Joint MD would meet us after we finished our meetings next day evening to get our feedback and how we would like to go forward. We started sensing that they had already decided to hire us and these meetings were only a formality to make sure that the VPs got to know us the way the MD and Joint MD understood us, so that the actual project would move smoothly. 

This got confirmed when one of the VPs mentioned that they had decided to engage us and he should discuss the issues of the bill payment project he is working on. We were both totally floored. Here was an MNC which had decided to hire us and seriously engage their senior management time to discuss with us on a project, and we had not even signed a contract. We realised that a big responsibility was coming our way and we should now think through the nature of the contract literally while we were engaged in our discussions. 

One of the major issues was what should be our fees. And how long this project would take, since the implementation part of it depended on what came out of the redesign.  We had no clue what it should be in both cases. Also we were used to relatively small companies in Hyderabad whose capacity to pay was not large, unlike Galxo being an MNC used to dealing with high cost consultants. While discussing with the VPs we got an inkling that they felt this project would take at least 6 to12 months to complete assuming we spent 2 days a week with their CFTs working with us. We also realised that they were used to paying a substantial amount per day for consultants like us which was at least 3 to 4 times what we could think of getting in Hyderabad. 

So after finishing the round of meetings with the VPs, when we met the joint MD with an outline of our approach to the project, he surprised us with the amount of fees they had in mind which was much larger than what we were thinking of asking and for once we realised that it was very important that even in corporate contracts value pricing would work. Let the client discover your value contribution expected and offer you the price based on it. He also mentioned that he would like to pay 25% of the total fees as a bonus after successful implementation. This became our model for all our subsequent assignments with other corporate clients we got, post the Glaxo assignment. 

He asked us to send a detailed proposal of our engagement plan with payment schedule so that the formal contract could be finalised and a kickoff date fixed for us to start work.

We got one more assignment  from Glaxo while we were implementing the redesign of the bill payment process, involving a major organisation restructuring of their branch and field operations, post a planned Voluntary Retirement Scheme by the end of the year.

In the next post, I will discuss the details of both the projects in Glaxo that we dealt with. We even published the bill payment process reengineering in a professional journal and I made it into a case study for classroom discussions at IIM Bangalore, my Alma Mater.

My Journey As A Consultant - 13

 Adapting Available IT Technology In Early Assignments

“How long does a customer have to wait to get the blood report of her child so that her doctor can start treatment?” we asked the team at the medical diagnostic centre.

“8-12 hours; very often till the next day.”

“So, since the customer needs a fast result, let’s target to complete this in 25-30 minutes”.

In 1993-94, when we started on our journey to help organisations implement Business Process Reengineering, one major limitation was the low level of technology-adoption by most of the organisations that we had to work with at that time. The few that had PC desktops used them as typewriters/word processors for the correspondence of senior managers, and to store data and documents as a backup, along with conventional paper files for the same. Hence the paperwork was always the first activity before the same material was entered into the PCs. Each PC was a standalone entity  used in different departments and hence the same data was re-entered from one PC to another using paper documents as reference. Occasionally floppy diskettes were used to copy and transfer the data from one PC to another. But this wasn't considered adequate and reverification would be done using the paper trails which were the basis of conventional working. 

The Local Area Network (LAN) was just being introduced in the market and hence we were able to suggest using this technology to connect the multitude of the PCs, so that data moved seamlessly across the organisation within the same premises. Dial-up modems were available; using them and File Transfer Protocols we organised movement of files and data across different locations. The Internet was just being talked about and it was not available across the country nor was it cheap where BSNL had introduced it. DOS was still the operating system commonly used and PC ATs with Windows were just being introduced. Mobile phones were yet to enter the market and when they did they were too costly to use. But pagers were available at quite a reasonable cost and in some cases we used them to help communicate between the office and field staff. As the technology evolved in both PCs and Mobile phones, and the Internet became affordable and ubiquitous in later years, we were able to help organisations adopt these technologies to implement BPR.

Between Raghav, my associate, and myself we adopted the dial-up modem and PCs to share important documents and created a virtual office between us. We also agreed that, depending on who has the  primary contact with the prospective client, the proposal would be made by him and the other would join as a principal associate. And we were maintaining zero overhead operations between us, working from our home office, fashionably called SOHO (Small Office Home Office) in those days. We started using our own example to show how work simplification is the essence of BPR and why it could easily be adopted in an organisation to improve business performance without adding additional resources in terms of manpower and office space. The only investment needed was IT hardware and the corresponding software. And both were undergoing phenomenal changes very fast and hence we had to keep in mind what was coming in the future while helping the organisations to come up with redesign ideas. 

In this background, I will proceed to share the story of how we got prospective clients interested in our proposal. By 1994, the paperback version of the book, Reengineering the Corporation, by Hammer and Champy was available in the local book stores. We bought a copy of the book before meeting a prospective client. We made it a point only to approach the CEO or MD of a company as our first point of contact, since we believed only a motivated person at the top could spearhead the kind of massive change initiative called for in BPR. This is where our personal contacts and network helped in setting up such first meetings with them. We also knew  that if the top man was not sold on the idea on our first meeting we would not get another opportunity. So we decided to  use the book as a sales tool. 

After a brief introduction about what we had done with our early clients and the kind of results obtained, we presented the book to the CEO and requested him to read the book first. And we told him that if he was charged up after reading the book we would meet him again to discuss the way forward. Practically every one of them contacted us 48 hours later saying that they could not put down the book once they started reading it, and saw possibilities from the book for their organisation to adopt. In the meanwhile, they also ordered additional copies of the book and shared it with their senior executives so that they also came on board before calling us for a discussion on the way forward. We found that, in many cases, we were hired even before we discussed pricing and other terms of a contract!!

Since we were based in Hyderabad, we decided to focus on this market. We contacted some prospects where we had done some work before. In my case, I had worked with Apollo Hospitals and Nagarjuna Finance earlier and we called on them both while our assignment with Hyderabad Batteries was still going on. The MD of Nagarjuna Finance, a leading NBFC at that time, was so charged up after reading the book that he called us immediately for an assignment to streamline their deposit mobilisation process. While  the ideas for reengineering got finalised quickly by the team, they got caught up with problems of IT implementation. The investment in hardware was not an issue, but the software had to be developed afresh and the IT chief was very kicked with the prospect of doing a pioneering job and said his team would work on it themselves without any outside help. However, they were struggling to come up with the software fast enough, since there was a constant churn of software people at the working level and we believe the competence level of the chief was also not enough to address the issues. 

One fine day, the IT head quit his post and migrated to Australia and the company simply abandoned the project instead of looking for outside help. This was the first assignment where we realised that we must have a good external IT vendor to back BPR projects. 

However, the Apollo Hospital case was a major success story. Since I had known the MD, Sangita Reddy, from my previous work, we could easily get to meet her, and she was very excited to hear about how BPR could be adopted. In the Hammer and Champy book, there was a case study of implementing BPR in a hospital in the USA, and we also managed to get hold of many other such examples which were available. After reading the book, she called us to make a presentation to the top management team consisting of the Chief Medical Officer, Medical Director and herself, who were the key decision makers. It was a post-lunch presentation and we were quite disappointed when we noticed both the CMO and Medical Director, being older men, dozing off occasionally, and we thought we had blown an opportunity. 

As we expected, when we met Sangita Reddy a few days later, she said the BPR exercise had been discussed with other senior staff too, and they felt that the disruption that such an intervention would cause to patient care was too severe to go forward, however excited she herself was.

Dejection! But we didn’t want to give up and kept the discussion going. And, during the conversation, we discovered that they had an offsite centre in the heart of the city where a diagnostic clinic was run with a small out-patient department where doctors were available for consultation. This was also used as a catchment centre for referring serious cases to the main hospital. The diagnostic centre was providing diagnostic services to patients referred by various city doctors located in the vicinity. Being part of Apollo Hospital, it had a high-profile image and was very much in demand for both OP consultation and diagnostic services. Seeing an opportunity here, we requested Sangita Reddy to let us explore what we could do there, since there would not be similar high-profile doctors to oppose this “disruption of their work”. 

This centre was headed by a young man who had studied hospital administration in the USA  and returned to India and was working for Apollo Hospital. Based on his background and experience, he was given independent charge of this centre. Like any other diagnostic centre, they had various departments starting from reception to cashier, sample collection and testing labs and other radiological labs like X Ray, ultrasound and cardiac care testing facilities like ECG, ECHO, TMT, etc. Patients requiring CT Scan and other more sophisticated facilities were referred to the main hospital. It was no different from any such stand-alone lab located across the city. The centre also had housekeeping staff and a few administrative personnel to provide typing and other related support.

When we first went to this location and looked around, we frankly had no clue at all about what we could change dramatically, as called for in BPR. This was a set-up like all others in the city -- indeed, in the country -- where patients arrived with prescriptions for various tests, got their samples taken by the staff, and went back home, to return a few hours later, or the next day, to collect their neatly typed-up reports, so that they could show these to their doctors and start a line of treatment. We had both gone through this process ourselves numerous times, very often for the ailments of our young children.

But we waded in, regardless, somehow knowing some inspiration would come our way...

We formed a cross-functional team (CFT) consisting of the receptionist, a sample collection technician, a technician from the labs, the typist and a housekeeper. The members of our team were some of the junior-most persons in the organisation and they were initially bewildered about being in any kind of improvement exercise. Most of the existing procedures were established by the heads of their departments who were located in the main hospital, and it was difficult for the CFT members to even see the shortcomings in the processes that had been well set for years. And when we said that they should come out with ways to dramatically improve such processes, all of them worried how any such move would be received by their bosses!

Seeing this early, and in order to soothe their nerves, we got Sangita Reddy herself to come and talk to them, assuring them that she was leading this project, that she expected great results, and no harm would come to any of them. They had never met her face-to-face before, and this meeting was a big morale-booster, so that we could take the assignment forward.

After the mandatory (for us) initial joint reading of the book by the team, we got them to collect information on their current way of working, including a lot of statistics. All data was manually entered in large ledgers -- there were no computers at this location. Despite this, we got a reasonable measure of information fairly quickly, since it was also supervised by the young manager in charge of the centre. We also got the team to track a sample number of actual patients from the moment they entered the centre till they got their final report, and record what happened in each case. 

When the team put together all this information, we encouraged them to look at the entire process from the patient’s (customer’s) view-point. How would they feel if their child was running a high temperature and they had to wait a day to get a diagnostic report and start the appropriate treatment? But the present way of working was deeply ingrained in them and they could see no options.

Then we brought out the concept of “Which steps in your process are of real value to the customer?” It didn’t take them long to list sample collection, lab analysis and report-typing as the only things the customer wanted. Once they focused on these three operations, they also soon concluded that sample collection and report-typing were each a matter of minutes. What about the lab analysis? It slowly emerged that, for perhaps 80-85% of tests, the actual testing time was also in minutes.

Thus emerged the challenging goal: In 80% of cases, customers should come in, give their samples, have a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, and go home within half an hour with their report.

I am not presenting the details of the redesign here since it involves some proprietary information; suffice it to say that they came out with a great and credible process redesign. We then told them they had to prepare and make the presentation to their management themselves -- youngsters who had never spoken before an audience before! To add to their terror, Dr. Pratap Reddy, the legendary Chairman of Apollo Group, happened to be in Hyderabad that day and invited himself to the event. 

But, despite the stuttering and nervousness of the team, their redesign ideas came through clearly. Dr Reddy, who was himself looking for revolutionary change in his fast-expanding group of hospitals, was blown away and, when he learned that a computer needed to be installed as part of the redesign process, he immediately told the team to “steal” one from anywhere in the main hospital and get on with their new process. In just a few weeks, the team could proudly proclaim their uniqueness among the dozens of diagnostic centres in the city.

The diagnostic report process being one that everyone has experienced, we made a presentation of this case a part of our initial presentation to prospective clients to make them understand the power of BPR to bring  about dramatic change.

This experience boosted our confidence to take this approach to more organisations which were much larger than the ones we had worked with till then. And that opportunity came when we got to work with Glaxo India in 1995-1996, which also catapulted us to get more work from large corporates across India. 

I will share the progress of this journey in my next post.

My Journey As A Consultant - 12

 Early Engagements and Insights Gained

“So, out of 100 tenders for which you quoted last year, how many became orders?”

“About 10, sir.”

“H-m-m. So, ten percent strike rate. And how much money did your company make on these orders?”

“None. We made a loss. And one of the main reasons was we missed the delivery deadline of six weeks by several months and incurred cost increases and penalties!”

“I see. So, in place of winning ten percent of the orders we quote for, shall we aim for HUNDRED percent? And let’s ensure we deliver ALL orders in, say, THREE weeks…”

When we started working on our first assignment at Hyderabad Batteries, and subsequently with other early clients, we were honestly not prepared for the kind of insights we got of the nature of problems faced by the client organisation and the types of solutions that emerged post implementation of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) concepts as adopted from the book by Hammer and Champy (referred to in the previous post). In order to ensure a proper framework, we literally followed the guidelines given in the book on how to go about implementing a BPR exercise. We formed cross-functional teams (CFT), set up Steering Committees (SC) consisting of senior managers, and identified a main sponsor at the top management level who, along with the SC, would be responsible for implementing the redesign recommendations made by the CFT and ensuring that the new processes were sustained as a way of life in future.

The first project we took up in the Power Systems Group was what we called the Order Fulfilment Process. Before we identified the name for this process, there was no recognition of this set of activities as a process in the company. The whole process was fragmented around various departments which were working in their respective silos, like any traditional company. The CFT we created had a member from each of these individual functions and they had a good working knowledge of the day-to-day operations. All of them agreed that, when they quoted for a tender, they always provided for a 60 percent gross margin; in practice, however, they were losing money on every order they executed. As usual, each member put the blame on the other functions for not doing their job properly, as is typical in most organisations.

So we asked the team to track a sample of 20 orders at random, starting from getting the tender document till the final payment was received, post the guarantee period. We also got them to collect various statistics of the number of tenders they participated in, etc., to get a feel for how effective they were in getting orders against the number of quotations. The team was shocked to find that, in a typical year, they had quoted for nearly 100 tenders with a strike rate of less than 10 percent. When we asked why this was so, the sales team member said they were not sure which order would  come their way, so they simply quoted against all enquiries. This, despite the fact that each tender called for a unique system design, with dozens of components to be put together. With such a large number of quotations to be prepared, every tender ended up involving making last-minute guesses by the sales team and the estimation team to meet the tender deadline. As a result, in every case where, luckily, they actually got an order, there was a lot of to-and-fro between the design and manufacturing teams, along with the purchase executives, and they usually had to approach the customer for several amendments to the order. 

Though the sales team usually quoted 16 weeks as the delivery period, nearly 12 weeks would pass before the order was clear in all respects and available for purchase and manufacturing to execute. Invariably, this resulted in  the actual order getting executed after anywhere between 24 to 32 weeks, leading to penalty clauses and cost escalations and wiping out the entire assumed margins. So while, in the beginning, everyone was blaming manufacturing for the delay and the cost increase, the realisation dawned on the CFT that the problem started with how the tenders were handled in the first place. 

We therefore asked the team to first set goals which looked impossible and crazy at the present moment. We pushed them to agree that the strike rate should be 100 percent and all deliveries should be done within 4 weeks. Having read the book together, they realised that, unless such “unrealistic” goals were set, no meaningful  reengineered process could result. 

The details of the reengineered process they came up with is a textbook example today, we even presented a paper based on it in a Manufacturing Excellence Conference later and half the audience responded saying they have similar problems in their own organisation. I am not going into the details of the redesign here. However, it is important to mention here that the 80-20 principle, along with aligning the supply chain right through from the customer requirement to the vendor before an offer was made, was the most important dimension of the reengineered process. The existing departments were disbanded and new teams focused around customer clusters were created around this supply chain. Very soon, the strike rate started improving to 80-plus percent and deliveries were getting made within 2 to 4 weeks from the acceptance of the order. The teams also noticed that, without adding more manpower or manufacturing facilities, they were able to handle three times more orders than before, and the volume of business started increasing steadily. 

I happened to meet the marketing manager of the company a couple of years later at Bombay airport and I asked him how things were at the company. He said that he was on his way to Kuwait to participate in an international tender for the Power Systems Group. He made a pointed comment that earlier he was always chasing the manufacturing for orders to be executed on time, and now the manufacturing team was chasing him to get more orders, as they had more capacity than they earlier estimated.

This was a very satisfying experience indeed. The Power Systems Group, which was struggling to make a profit on a  turnover of ₹15 crore long ago, is today doing several hundreds of crores of business and driving the growth of the Hyderabad  Batteries group.

The other project we undertook involved classic manufacturing improvement using concepts of SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) and OTED (One Touch Exchange of Dies) in their battery manufacturing unit. Here the problem was that the manufacture of all batteries involved, as the first step, making the cells of the battery using a die press followed by a sintering process. Once the cells are made, they need to be encased in metal containers which involve cutting smaller sections from a large sheet before they are formed to hold the cells. These cells are then assembled to form an appropriately rated battery. 

A major problem they faced was a mismatch between the stock of these components and the requirement for manufacturing. This in turn was because of the large batch sizes programmed for these machines; and these long runs were necessitated by the long machine time lost in changing the machine set-up from one component to another. Naturally, everyone was blaming everyone else. 

So we formed two teams, one for the die press area and another for the sheet cutting. The first team consisted of engineers who were working as supervisors at the press section and the other team consisted of the workers manning the cutting machine with the supervisor as one of the team members. 

For the die press, we asked for data on the setup change method and how much time it took to make the change. My associate, Raghav Rao, who had good experience in this area, used a video camera to record the actual process, to show to the team what was the real value-adding time and how many activities they were performing which were not adding value but incurring a lot of time to complete the change. The current method involved a very complicated process which eventually took nearly 8 to 9 hours to change the set-up for different dimensions of the cells. Using the SMED principles, we challenged the team to come up with design changes in the machine set-up, to bring the whole process down to less than 10 minutes. Obviously, everyone balked at the idea and said it was crazy. Even the supplier of the machine from abroad has not done it. We said this was all  the more reason they should do it! 

Without going into the technical details of this project, with some probing and questioning on the current method, and forcing the young engineers to think outside the box, Raghav got them to come up with a new design for the dies which made it possible to reduce the set-up time from 9 hours to 30 minutes. We said we had agreed it should be less than10 minutes, so they had to work on improving this further to reduce the time. Once they realised that they were able to reduce the time to 30 minutes, which had looked impossible to begin with, now the young team took it up as a challenge and came up with a new design which achieved the set-up change in 9 minutes. 

In the second case, where the sheet metal needed to be cut to different sizes, the set-up time was taking anywhere between 30 minutes to one hour for different dimensions of length required. It also involved some waste due to trial and error during the set-up. Instead of telling them to think of a new design, we took the workers’ team to a marble vendor where, using a similar machine, a young boy was cutting different lengths of marble using a back stopper, and changeover from one length to another took less than 1 minute. One look at that, and all the workers unanimously said they could do the same in their factory and implemented a solution which achieved OTED at the sheet cutting section.

Having completed our engagements at Hyderabad Batteries group, we noted down what lessons we had learnt from these projects. One of the most important lessons was that the apparent problem seen by everyone was not the real problem, but only a symptom of something more deep-rooted in the organisation. And when we apply new concepts of Reengineering and Intelligent Manufacturing and get the people in the organisation to work on adopting them, the real solutions come, which now becomes owned by them and implementation happens.

In the next post, I shall share our journey further into other organisations, how we first got management buy-in and then worked on a pilot project to demonstrate how these ideas could be adopted in any organisation.