Published on March 15, 2021
Tata ClassEdge (TCE) is a preferred digital products and service provider among K-12 schools in India with aspirations of being the market leader by 2025. The company’s mission is to improve the effectiveness of education systems through high-impact digital learning products, solutions and services.
TCE has been working towards building a culture of continuous improvement and fostering an environment that enables innovative thinking. To understand and leverage some of the best practices in the Tata group and support TCE in its endeavours, Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG) facilitated a best practice sharing session with Tata Sky. Hemant Bhatkhande, Vice President - Business Excellence, from Tata Sky led the session with practices on continuous improvement.
The key learnings for TCE through the interaction were:
- Social immersion of the business excellence culture within the organisation from the employee induction phase itself
- Formulation of project teams that can be extremely simple yet impactful in their outcomes
- Leveraging the EDGE portal for learning new and contemporary practices
Post the session, TCE will be implementing some of the learnings and is planning to set up an innovation process which would help undertake various collaborative efforts towards making business excellence a way of life at TCE. Details of these improvement initiatives following the session with Tata Sky are:
- Cross-functional teams: TCE in FY’21 had leveraged cross-functional teams (CFT) to address business challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, TCE had launched eight online products for the customers. The CFT approach in terms of understanding the customer requirements, leveraging the expertise across functions for designing and rolling out the offering and institutionalising a strong feedback mechanism for customer feedback and response has been laid out. The CFTs are responsible from the stage of ideation to the launch followed by monitoring its progress for the first three to six months. Once these product/ideas are out of the incubation bay they become a part of the mainstream offering to clients
- Idea generation structure: In April 2020, while TCE was listing its business risks and opportunities, innovation was identified as a key theme and suggested to be made a part of the regular thinking for the teams/organisation. The first step in this direction has been taken up as creating an idea generating platform, where every employee would contribute one idea which could lead to an increase or improvement in revenue, productivity, or process. The broader idea is to take up winning ideas as short/medium term projects with the support of mentors (identified internally) and build results on it. This platform is in the final stages of discussion with a few of the internal stakeholders and is expected to be rolled out soon
Participant Speak
The endeavour at Tata ClassEdge (TCE), is to strengthen our presence in Indian schools by constantly improving our product lines, service efficiencies and align our internal processes accordingly. We have recently been awarded ISO 9001:20015 certification. However, as a growing organisation we aspire to build a culture of continuous improvement and innovative thinking. At TCE, we have immensely gained by leveraging the cross-functional teams (CFTs) to find workable solutions for our current business challenges. Our interaction with the Tata Sky team has been very useful and provided good insights on building a conducive and encouraging atmosphere for nurturing innovative thinking and continuous improvement within the organisation. We would like to thank the Tata Sky team for their time in sharing their best practices and robust implementation plans for the same.
Sanjay Radhakrishnan, Chief Commercial Officer, Tata ClassEdge