Jagdish Ramaswamy, CKO and president CWCM, Aditya Birla Group, outlines the strategic objectives of the programme |Â
How does the WCM programme enable the Aditya Birla Group companies to focus on achieving their strategic objectives? The WCM programme is a very holistic one consisting of a certain set of practices, processes and assessment framework. While practices and processes focus a lot on ensuring consistency in operations, the assessment framework helps the group companies to align all their practices and processes to the strategic objectives of the company. The management processes of leadership commitment to excellence, strategic planning and execution is assessed as a part of the WCM maturity along with assessing the alignment of all other core and support processes to the strategic objective. Thus, the performance of the business/ unit is scored and judged with respect to how well it supports the organization in reaching its strategic objectives.
How important is it for you’ll to manage your assets effectively? How does the programme help in achieving the same?
The WCM framework is founded on the principles of total productive maintenance (TPM), the Japanese way of managing the assets (equipment and machinery) and the plant for achieving highest productivity. One of the major areas of focus in this section is what we call the OEE/OPE (overall equipment efficiency/overall plant efficiency). The WCM method has a very structured practice that starts from identifying assets, testing it for its initial performance, ensuring the operations procedures are defined in detail. The operators and engineers are fully trained and a set of preventive maintenance is done on all assets. Autonomous maintenance is also practiced where the asset ownership is transferred to the operator. A lot of preventive maintenance practices like condition based monitoring and reliability centred maintenance that focus on minimising/ eliminating breakdowns are followed at the highest level of maturity. The WCM framework assesses how well these practices are embedded/matured and accordingly a scoring system is used to tell one how good they are. This helps plants to work on areas of opportunities.
Considering business processes as an asset that should be actively managed, maintained and continuously improved, both within your plant and beyond the four walls, how do you ensure consistency in your processes?
When you look at an organisation, it consists of three types of processes: critical or core business, management and support or enabling processes. At an organisation level our business excellence framework will assess the core processes effectiveness and efficiency in meeting the customer needs and organisational internal expectations. The focus at an overall level is on the customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, business growth in terms of top and bottom line and in general on the partnership with the community that we work in. While looking at the performance of the business in totality, the link and the alignment of the enabling and the management processes towards facilitating overall organisation performance is assessed. Specific business practices towards standardisation, use of methods like lean and Six Sigma for solving high impact business problems, sharing of best practices across units and businesses are focussed on very deeply, during the assessment. Adopting the business excellence framework, conducting the self-assessments every year and taking actions on the findings enables us to achieve consistency across all the business processes.
Lean manufacturing has been at the centre of everyone’s attention especially in today’s times where cost cutting and eliminating wasteful practices has become a norm.
Kindly elaborate by giving us a brief example on how by adopting the lean principle, efficiency was enhanced on the shopfloor. Since most of our plants are continuous process plants we had to position lean differently in the group. We have used lean manufacturing in two areas viz. identification of waste and improving flexibility within plant and optimising inventory and improving on time delivery to customer by focussing on extended value chain.
Our manufacturing units run multiple identification and elimination campaigns where workers on the shop floor identify waste in their area and come up with ideas to eliminate them. To improve plant flexibility of our process plants we have used quick changeover/SMED techniques for reducing changeover time for switching from one grade to other. A number of lean transformation projects have been taken up using value steam mapping approach to focus on extended value chain starting from raw material procurement till delivery to customers. The focus of these projects has been to improve flow in the process to optimise work in process and finished goods inventory and using pull systems to improve on time delivery to our customers.
Tell us how one can unearth the untapped potential of the Six Sigma principle. Six Sigma is a very powerful technique, a method and a management philosophy that aims at reducing variation across one’s business processes be it manufacturing, service or support. First and foremost is to understand its purpose i.e. to reduce variability in processes. One needs to have hands on experts that have used and demonstrated the benefits to the organisation leading the Six Sigma journey. There are lot of people with theoretical knowledge but lack implementation
expertise. We should be careful to choose the right person to lead the initiative. Second is to have your best people trained in the methods and tools of identifying and reducing variability in processes. Third is to engage all the trained people in solving big problems that are aligned fully to the strategic or operational objectives of the o r g a n i s a t i o n . Fourth is to review with seriousness the rigor and correctness of usage of the method and finally to link the benefits to the business directly. Unless one does all the steps in unison their six sigma effort will remain ineffective.
How does the WCM programme help enhance employee satisfaction?
Under the WCM framework there is a huge focus on people practices, people management and people results. One of the fundamental beliefs of our WCM framework is that people need to be engaged and fully involved in the WCM success through constant training, empowerment, working together as team to solve problems in the form of Kaizens. We measure the implementation of Kaizen through what we call ‘Kaizens per employee’. The number of successful Kaizens implemented, celebrate Kaizens in a big way, and spend a lot of time teaching and mentoring people across levels. The effectiveness of the people management practices is measured in the employee perception surveys and internal customer surveys.