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.
