My Journey As A Consultant - 25

 The End Of The Journey

I was so busy working on multiple assignments, travelling to different cities, that I was not keeping much track of the status of my health. After my daughter’s wedding in April 2005, I was diagnosed with Diabetes and I started following strict health care protocols while also taking medications. But the work continued and I didn't bother about minor signals showing something was seriously going wrong inside my body.

While I was working with Zuari Industries and Crompton Greaves, I got a call from Mr Madhok who had retired from Zuari, telling me that he would shortly become Chairman of the Board of a German multinational called GEAP based out of Baroda, specialising in EPC contracts for milk, food and chemical industries all over the world. GEAP had taken over the Milk Products EPC division of L & T in India since they had taken over the parent company of this division in Denmark, and since Mr Madhok had worked in the Denmark company for 19 years before joining Zuari, he was invited to become the Chairman of their Indian arm.

Mr Madhok had indicated that he would call me after taking up this new assignment soon and, true to his word, he did. Because of his conviction about our ability to guide and implement Reengineering concepts, the top management team agreed to hire us. The main focus of this company was EPC contracts and they were working on project mode and, as is quite normal in many Indian companies, they never finished any of their projects on time, suffering delays and financial losses in many cases. This case was very similar to the first BPR assignment we did with Hyderabad Batteries group except that GEAP did not have any manufacturing facilities of their own. They were dependent on third party vendors for supply and their own team would do the design, erection and commissioning work. Since a small team of engineering specialists had to simultaneously handle multiple projects and the company had organised to work in a functional mode, no single individual was responsible for ultimate  delivery even though they had a project manager in place. For the first time, we used the TOC Critical Chain concepts along with BPR to guide the CFT to come up with a reengineered process to deliver in time or ahead of time.

While we were working on this, GEAP told us that they had already contracted to implement SAP with the help of L&T Infotech Ltd. We advised them to keep that project on hold till our redesign was completed. We also told them that they may have to renegotiate the SAP project based on the redesign. They agreed, and when the redesign was presented to L&T Infotech, they  were told that the SAP implementation had to conform to the BPR needs. L&T Infotech agreed to modify their standard implementation accordingly. 

During the course of implementation, the MD changed and the new MD was recruited based on a larger mandate to diversify the company into other areas of chemical projects apart from food and milk, and the scope of our implementation got widened, In the meanwhile, the parent company sent an expert to train the Indian team on their global approach to Project Management and when he and his team were presented our BPR redesign by the CFT, they appreciated that we were on the same page with them and completed their training easily without much difficulty. We  were associated with GEAP for nearly 2 years, after which we signed off.

While working with GEAP, I got a call from my previous client, Mr Natarajan, who had joined Sanmar Engineering in Chennai as MD. He had once told me before that he saw the need for my kind of work at Sanmar and he would call me when the time came. A year later, around early 2007, I got his call and I visited Chennai to meet up with his team. He felt that the Unit Team should take a call on hiring me and suggested that I meet one of their Unit chiefs at their factory located outside of Chennai. This meeting was interesting in the way it proceeded. During my meeting, I told the CEO of the unit that I was not an expert to advise them but I would be working with their team to make changes happen. He was quite kicked with this and immediately called all his other senior managers to meet me to discuss our approach. Originally he had scheduled for a one hour meeting but finally we spent close to 3 hours. At the end of the meeting, he said he would report their views to Mr  Natarajan. Natarajan had asked me  to meet him after my meeting at the factory in their city office. In my presence, he called up the  CEO and put the speaker phone on. He had asked me to just listen while he spoke. Immediately as the call was put through, the CEO was all gung-ho about my meeting with him and his team. He said he was quite impressed with me since I did not claim any expertise like other consultants he had met and I was down to earth about how we could help them implement change and he and his team were keen on hiring us. Thus we landed this assignment with Sanmar.

Though we got the contract easily and finished the redesign presentation in the 3 months period envisaged, due to some internal dynamics being played out between the corporate office and the unit heads, the implementation did not happen. I was very disappointed and Mr Natarajan also felt that under the circumstances it was better to leave the project without implementation now. This was the only assignment where we left without implementing the redesign.

During the course of my journey, I had  also worked with a few other smaller clients who would start the project, get their redesign ideas and sign off  saying they would come back later for implementation but would never come back. I realised that, for most of them, the IT investments required both for hardware and software were beyond their capacity at that time. So I started advising some small IT vendors offering ERP solutions to small businesses to work on a new business model of offering IT services on a pay-per-use basis which later came to be known as SAAS, viz. Software As A Service. This way they could have many clients easily coming on board with low revenue budgets compared with going for capital expenditure on IT infrastructure. This also helped them expand their market quickly.

Apart from these assignments, some old clients like Saket Engineers called us again in 2007 asking  for help in dealing with their current problems after a gap of 4 years. I was also associated with a poultry industry company called Singh Poultry which had promoted  a downstream company called Starchik Limited as a marketing consultant and later as a Director on the board of this company. It was very odd that I, being a pure vegetarian who had never tasted chicken in my life, was associated  in this capacity with this company !!!!

Around 2006, Herald Logic was merged with an Australian Company called Value Chain, promoted by some ex-Infosys managers from Australia. When the new owners heard from Herald Logic that I,  along with Rajan, had helped them get all their assignments so far, they appointed us as their advisers for their global operations. However, Value Chain could not bring in the money required as per their agreement with Herald Logic in the stipulated time and the whole merger fell through and, along with that, our association.

Around mid 2008, a nagging problem with my digestive system suddenly gave way to an emergency. One night I could not sleep due to serious pain in the right side of my stomach and, early the next morning, I called a gastroenterologist who was my neighbour to come immediately to check me out. He had one look at the symptoms and said it was an emergency as something was seriously wrong with my gall bladder and I was rushed to hospital. After a series of tests, the doctors told me my abdomen was filled with fluid and I needed to have surgery the very next day to address the problem. After 4 hours of   surgery, when I regained consciousness the next day, I was told that my gallbladder had burst and 90% of it had gangrene and they had to remove the gallbladder to save my life. Well, the Almighty decided that I still needed to be alive when I knocked on his doors, and He sent me back!!

It took me two weeks to come out of the hospital and another 3 to 6 months to become normal. But I still had restrictions on my diet which forced me to take a hard decision to hang up my boots as a Management Consultant. With the help of my colleagues, I completed the assignments in hand and finally closed my consultancy operation under the name of Shika Management Services from April 1, 2009. I never imagined before that I would ever have to do this but then “man proposes and god disposes” is an old saying!!

When I look back at my journey, I feel it was very full of new learnings and new experiences and not a single dull moment. And I felt  that I was doing path-breaking work at a most crucial time in the history of Indian businesses and industry when the country transformed from a command-and-control economy to a liberalised economy. At the same time, Information Technology was exploding and new ideas in management were floated like BPR, LEAN and TOC and I was able to help the Indian industry adopt these ideas and technology to survive and grow. It was a very satisfying journey indeed. 

After several years, I had met up with some of these clients and they used to remember with a lot of nostalgia about our work. Mr Harbans Singh of Singh Poultry said in one of those meetings that we were the best professionals he had ever met in his life. And Ms.Sangeetha Reddy of Apollo Hospitals  said she was very impressed with our passion for our work. Mr Natarajan of Saint Gobain Vetrotex said he had continued using the learnings from this experience with us in his subsequent engagements as MD in other companies where he worked till retirement. To all of them, and to all my other clients, I must say a big Thank You for giving me the opportunity to work in their organisation and make my life worth living.