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.
