Published on March 26, 2020
More than 60 Business excellence Heads and professionals of Tata companies in India attended the regional BE Heads Meet organised by Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG) on March 23, 2020. In view of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the event, which was originally planned as an in-person regional meet, was rescheduled to a virtual one through the Webex platform.
The event started with a context setting session by Sanjeev Singh, AVP, TBExG, in which he re-emphasised on the role of the BE Head, which includes building BE capability, programme management for organisational initiatives, strengthening the culture of excellence and promoting process excellence. He added that to make business excellence initiatives even more effective within Tata companies, initiatives including TBEM diagnostics need to make a direct business impact. The agenda for the day was carefully crafted based on feedback received from participants in the previous BE Heads Meet.
BE Heads from three companies – Tata Sky, Tata Power and Tata Autocomp Systems – then shared their experiences pertaining to the BE plan rollout and implementation within their companies. Hemant Bhatkhande from Tata Sky explained how business excellence is looked at as a catalyst within the company and includes key aspects of operational excellence like process management, process improvement and governance. He also gave a snapshot of how the organisation has made progress in business excellence, right from putting in place a three-year BE plan, awareness sessions with the top three levels, to continuous improvement initiatives in partnership with TBExG. Rashmikant from Tata Power took the participants through the BE action planning process of the company and provided examples on how BE actions are planned, reviewed and executed by various internal stakeholders and functions. He also threw light on some strategic, tactical and operational actions that were taken within the organisation on the basis of the TBEM feedback process. Sudipta Marjit from Tata AutoComp Systems explained how business excellence is a key part of the strategic planning process and gave details on some of the key BE actions driven at the corporate level through TBExG’s offerings of capability building programmes and best practice implementations. He also shared about the company’s internal assessment process during which 14 business units develop a TBEM application, are assessed by internal assessors and recognition takes place through a special programme at the end of the cycle.
Next up was an applied session from Anshuman Tiwari, Global Head of Delivery Excellence, DXC Technologies, on driving process excellence in an organisation. During his talk, Mr Tiwari stressed on the importance of process improvement practices, creating efficiency through robust project management processes and also on making operations easy and efficient. He also emphasised on how BE Heads can take a lead in their organisation’s digital operations efforts.
Poushali Chatterjee, AVP, Tata Consultancy Services, then facilitated an interesting session introducing design thinking to the participants. She reiterated that design thinking is all about a user-centric approach to solve problems through radical innovation, and gave examples of design thinking that companies like GE, Titan and other organisations have deployed to solve common problems across various industries.
The session ended with an open house with S Padmanabhan, Executive Chairman, TBExG.