Published on July 31, 2023
Key Business Challenges
Nelco is India's leading Satellite Communication Service Provider and serves business-critical applications in Enterprise, Aero and Maritime sectors. Nelco operates in a niche industry which is going through a global technology innovation curve and a major regulatory transformation in India. With new Indian and global players showing interest in the growing Indian Satcom market, the competitive landscape is also evolving. Nelco has a leadership position in the key Satcom sectors like ATM, offshore Oil & Gas, Aero, and Maritime. The company has maintained a competitive edge through its strong global partnerships to adopt the latest Satcom technologies and cater to the varied needs of its customers. In view of the emerging business environment and competitive landscape of the Satcom industry in India, Nelco embarked on a journey of continuous improvement to build differentiators, leverage emerging growth opportunities and stay ahead of the competition.
To instil a culture of business excellence into the organisational DNA, Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG) and Nelco worked together to develop a customised programme that focused on strategic and operational priority areas while adhering to the key principles of excellence. The objective was to create and institutionalise an organisation-wide improvement framework, which would involve multiple projects to be run in parallel. Seven projects were identified as part of this programme, on topics ranging from reduction in customer complaints and time for resolution, to reduction in hub downtime and improving capability of systems to generate insights for the future. The programme also included some strategic projects like strengthening key account management, competency management and competitive intelligence processes in the company.
Expectations from TBExG
Nelco engaged TBExG with the aim of achieving the following:
- To instil a culture of business excellence into the organisational DNA, Nelco wanted to achieve significant improvement through a few key strategic projects, which can be the catalysts on improvement journey.
- The company wanted to assess its safety structures, systems and standards, and develop an action plan to improve the safety levels.
- Nelco also wanted to strengthen its key account management practices to ringfence its key accounts from any competition intrusion attempts.
- Additionally, the company wanted to leverage the expertise in the group to create a structured Competitive Intelligence Programme, which would provide senior management with timely insights needed for strategic decision-making to stay ahead of the competition.
- The following KPIs were targeted by the implementation of this comprehensive programme:
- Financial: Cost to serve, profitability, share of wallet
- Operational: Volume of customer complaints, SLAs, call closure TAT, service uptime
- Products: Number of differentiated services
- Customer: Number of CXO engagements, touchpoint feedback score
- Workforce: Employee productivity, competency scores
The programme has delivered well on its objectives.
Outputs and Insights from the Programme
- The Key Account Management process has been strengthened, and potential differentiators have been identified for key accounts, closely aligned with the company’s strategic direction. The competitive intelligence framework, curated and customised for Nelco’s business context, has been rolled out and has already started to provide valuable insights for existing and emerging competitors. The first Strategy Playbook for a major competitor was co-created by Nelco and TBExG teams. To run this programme, a 6-member CFT consisting of members from Strategy, Finance, Network Operations, Product and Regulatory teams has been created under the direct oversight of the MD & CEO.
- The identification of key competencies has been completed for all functions, and the company is now in the process of assessing the current competency levels. The productivity enhancement intervention has successfully triggered multiple process enhancements and digitalisation initiatives. Driven by data to arrive at the right conclusions, each CIP project team has identified key actions for reducing complaints, improving uptime, and enhancing asset traceability. These are being implemented and expected to produce actual metric results soon.
- The company has successfully leveraged the programme's insights to drive overall organisational development and has embarked on a journey to build future-ready processes and culture. Nelco team members attained a systemic view of the processes while also building capabilities in data analysis, improvement tools & methodologies, FMEAs, and the ability of IT systems to capture and produce accurate information for analysis.
Charting the Next Course
Nelco, in view of the success of the engagement, has launched ‘Enhance-a-thon’, an umbrella improvement programme at the company level to instil a culture of continuous improvement deeper into the organisation. The learnings from the first round of projects led to identifying more opportunities for systemic improvements, which will be addressed in this programme while also involving a significant number of employees. The focus is on a holistic governance model for monitoring the actions and impact from last year’s projects and the new projects identified under the ‘Enhance-a-thon’ programme.
EDGE Impact stories highlight the positive transformations accomplished by Tata companies in their business processes through interventions such as deep dive diagnostics and best practice implementations, in collaboration with Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG).
Feedback from Senior Leadership
We are glad that we took this step, as we can see a lot of positive impact in the organisation because of the interactions with TBExG, which has brought in a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience. We have truly been able to leverage the advantage of being a Tata company and will also look forward to contributing to other companies by the practices we embed.
— P J Nath, MD & CEOThis programme design helped our teams focus on outcomes with a different lens. The journey was challenging, and it took a while to build momentum. But now that we are well on our way, the Continuous Improvement Programme is no longer only looked on as a framework to achieve process robustness, but also as an enabler to achieve the strategic objectives of the company. To further build the improvement culture and disseminate the learnings from these improvement projects, we are looking forward to initiating the CIP 2.0 programme in FY24. We’ve launched this as ‘Enhance-a-thon’ – a holistic continuous improvement organisation-wide programme
— Pooja Johar, Head - Strategy, Risk Management & Business ExcellenceThrough this journey with TBExG, we are trying to leverage business excellence as a mode for collaboration with the Group companies. The objective is to learn from across the sectors and contextualise them to our business needs. We are, in fact, working towards truly leveraging a One-Tata ideology. Learning from Tata Capital, Tata Power, Tata Technologies, Tata Play and Voltas, to name a few, was truly enriching and has helped us build an improvement culture within the organisation.
— Daniel Alex, Head - IFMC Business