Confederation of Indian Industry(CII) Partners with BMGI for the 3rd Annual CII Lean Six Sigma Summit
Doing more with LeSS
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) along with Breakthrough Management Group International (India) as the Knowledge Partner organized the 3rd edition of Lean Six Sigma Summit in March 2012 at Sheraton Saket, New Delhi. The theme for the summit this year was “Doing More with LeSS” to showcase the power of Lean-Six Sigma in successfully taking on critical business issues.
India continues on its growth trajectory in spite of difficult domestic as well as global economic conditions. Sustaining the growth momentum is the biggest challenge facing India Inc.
In this challenging backdrop where Indian businesses are faced with increasing costs, pricing pressures and increasing competition, Lean-Six Sigma has been an effective Excellence enabler and proved to be very instrumental in helping organizations solve their most pressing business issues. “Doing More with LeSS” has become an imperative for Indian businesses. Lean Six Sigma with its rigor and structured framework has helped organizations compete strongly in the marketplace and accelerate their growth path.
Summit Highlights
Inaugurating the Summit, Mr Vineet Sharma, Executive Vice President (Quality & Business Excellence), Max New York Life Insurance, talked about how survival today is impossible without Excellence. Mr Sharma appropriately remarked, “Quality is like a religion… Once you choose a religion, you have to follow it through” BMGI’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Naresh T Raisinghani, stressed on the need for shifting the paradigms of Lean-Six Sigma. He talked about how Lean-Six Sigma had evolved in focus over the years, starting with a product focus to process focus to customer focus and now the need was to sift to a business focus. To achieve this, Mr Raisinghani highlighted four paradigm shifts that need to occur:
Paradigm 1: Shift from Reducing Cost to Growing Revenues:Where organizations have used Lean-Six Sigma to drive down costs, the time is ripe in growing the topline through Lean-Six Sigma.
Paradigm 2: Shift from Refining to Designing:Studies have shown that 70% of defects are designed in. Mr Raisinghani highlighted using the Lean-Six Sigma methods such as Design for Six Sigma can raise the successful product launch rate from 14 % to as high as 45%.
Paradigm 3: Shift from Core Operations to Also Support Processes Improvement:The Lean-Six Sigma evolves, a large opportunity for deriving business benefit lies awaiting in the support areas such as Finance, HR, Utilities amongst others.
Paradigm 4: Shift from Bottom-up to Top-Down Project Selection:Although it may be “culturally good” to have employees down the line select projects that would be driven through Lean-Six Sigma, it has been seen that such projects may not deliver large business benefit. A paradigm shift is required here with the Leadership Team being made responsible for selecting business projects that are aligned to the business priorities and can be broken down to tackle employees’ critical concerns.
Mr Vikas Gera, Worldwide Operational Excellence & Lean Six Sigma Quality Leader, HP India, talked about the need for Lean-Six Sigma in terms of its ability to impact cost and revenue and hence profit. To this end, he highlighted the theory of diminishing returns from Lean-Six Sigma when deployed in a cost centre environment. In contrast, the benefits can be much larger when Lean-Six Sigma is deployed at a P&L level vis-à-vis just a cost level. He further advised on the importance of adopting LSS methodologies “smartly” based on the situation – for instance, LSS will need to be used differently in a manufacturing environment where manufacturing accounts for a large part of the cost pie whereas in services, manpower accounts for large part of the overall operations. Mr Gera also talked about the importance of understanding the needs of the “customer’s customer”, which would enable further increasing the return from a LSS engagement.
“You are not here to buy good players, but to buy wins”, Mr Mudit Saxena, Senior VP and Leader, Genpact, cited from the movie “Moneyball”. The key takeaway here is the importance of having the right metric and how it can guide problem solving efforts. Mr Saxena also highlighted the change in business model in the IT/ITeS businesses with a move from fixed to variable pricing. In this environment, Lean-Six Sigma has a critical role to play in driving efficiencies and costs for the outsourcing company, which can be offered to the customer and in return, the customer gives incentives to the outsourcing company by allowing them to retain a part of the cost efficiencies, thereby making it a win-win deal.
Ms Susmita Narayan, Head – Quality (India) from Agilent Technologies (International) India Pvt. Ltd. shared her thoughts on making customers your biggest advocate by building customer loyalty. Customer loyalty results increased revenue which can be achieved through renewal of contracts, re-purchase and adoption of new offerings early by customers. Ms Narayan talked about basic attributes that drive customer satisfaction such as – responding promptly to customer concerns, resources allocated to problem resolution etc. However in order to drive customer loyalty, one needs to focus on parameters such as the effort expended by customers to solve their problem, providing solutions around the customers.
Mr Bill Remy, Executive Vice President, International Operations and Board Director, TBM (USA) presented on driving value creation through Operational Excellence. Mr Remy stressed on the need to think like a CEO while driving Lean. This would result in seeing how Lean can assist in furthering the objectives of the business rather than looking at it as a standalone program.
Mr Anand Tamboli, Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director, Knewron, spoke about adding the human touch to LSS Programs. He highlighted several good practices including the need for communication to the deepest levels in the organization and ensuring right people on critical jobs & teams. He also highlighted that it is not that people do not like to change – people don’t like being changed by somebody else. Hence the need to empower people and show them the benefits of the expected outcomes – people will initiate change on their own.
Mr Sheshadri BC, Global Head -Transition and Quality Management, Infosys talked about differentiation in market place using continuous improvement methods. He explained the deployment of process improvement at Infosys that covers both the top-down approach (eg workshops, STAR assessments, strategic goals, client targets) and a bottom-up approach (eg employee ideas, customer feedback). He also shared the 3S method of deployment of Lean / Six Sigma at Infosys – Simple Processes, Swift Resolution and Smarter Practices. This has resulted in several benefits to Infosys such as Improvement in cycle times of 10-40%, productivity gains of between 20-35% and zero defects in 35-40 client processes.
Mr K Kulbhushan, Senior Vice President & Global Head – Business Excellence & Organization Development, Jubilant Life Sciences Ltd shared his experiences of how they successfully drove Lean Six Sigma in his organization. To drive LSS, they took it up at 3 level of engagement- strategic, operational & tactical. The focus was to make the approach top down to ensure alignment with the strategic focus of the organization and at the same time, to adopt a bottom up approach to ensure execution at the ground level. During the evolution of LSS, a transition occurred from the concept of a Black Belt to a Smart Belt to a Strategic Belt.
Ms Hina Rajpal, Operations & Supply Chain Leader | S&T GIC | GBS, IBM India Pvt. Ltd. shared her views on Lean Six sigma for supply chain. She pointed out that inspite of customer demand being highly volatile, few companies collaborate with customers in design and demand. She recommended collaborative forecasting which involves an effective means to involve customers in the forecasting process and ensure feedback to customers as regards their requirements. She also advocated leveraging statistical forecasting techniques along with collaboration with customer to get an accurate forecast.
About BMGI
Breakthrough Management Group International (BMGI), a global consulting firm with a strong focus on delivering results, partners with organizations in various stages of their business life cycle to transform their business performance. BMGI enables businesses drive growth and improve profitability. Headquartered in the US, BMGI has developed a loyal clientele that today exceeds 200 active clients. More than 400 engagements have been delivered by about 200 full-time consultants spread located in offices around the globe. BMGI has delivered cumulative benefits to its clients worth several billion dollars with an ROI of 5:1 to 20:1.
In India, BMGI is located in Mumbai. BMGI clients are leading Fortune 1000 Global companies and leading Indian companies from diverse industries such as financial services, IT/ITES, airlines, chemicals, FMCG, discrete manufacturing, telecommunications, petrochemical, textiles, biotechnology, healthcare & energy. Few of the major BMGI global clients are Hitachi, Siemens, Philips, Unilever, DeBeers, Avis Budget Group, TNT Express, and General Dynamics, Indian clients include Grameenphone, Vodafone, Hulamin, ThyssenKrupp Electrical Steel, Brandix, Arvind, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank, Motilal Oswal, Asian Paints, Tata Chemicals, Reliance Industries Limited, Sudarshan Chemicals, Cognizant and Accenture.
BMGI is known to be one of the most effective thought leaders in the Business / Management Consulting space and has gained world-wide attention through its several international bestselling books such as The Innovators Toolkit, Insourcing Innovation, Design for Lean Six Sigma, A Team Leader Guide to Lean Kaizen Events and many more.
Press Contact:
Deepak Muthreja
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