Indra’s Drishtikona (Viewpoint)

Teach some management tools, road maps and measuring rods at school stage

Posted : January 30, 2005 at 9:01 am [IST]

How near are we to the goal? Are we moving in the right direction? Right management tools, techniques and metrics are essential to measure, evaluate or revalidate the business goals.

During my HM days, I heard of the famous Birla ‘Partha’ system that the senior Birlas used to run their empire effectively. It worked. They were at the top.

With global competition, naturally many new systems were invented and tried. In 90s, India got nearer to Japanese companies, particularly in manufacturing. Many Japanese companies tried to come in through joint collaboration route. However, only few out of those survived and moved ahead to be noticed today. Maruti Udyog is one success story. Today, it is a Japanese company under the management of Suzuki Motors.

Indian companies and mangers learnt a lot from these companies about the Japanese management system. The Japanese system made a great impact on workplace management.
Indian companies tried to emulate the Japanese with company uniforms, company song, morning exercises and meetings, quality circles, 7 problem solving tools, Kaizen and 5S.Toyata Production System became the most sought after management book. TQM, TPM, QFD, Taguchi’s Quality Engineering and QLF, New 7 management tools followed. Many Japanese Gurus visited India and provided the consultancy for improving the workplace management. Auto components ancillaries became the pioneer in using these tools. And that is perhaps one reason of the sector going global and getting so much of attention from the global auto majors.

Some other tools are also getting into the corporate arena. EVA, or Economic Value Added, is one important shareholder-related metric that companies have begun to use it successfully. Godrej is using it. The Balanced scorecard is another tool. Tatas are adopting it to make sure that their strategy delivers. Six Sigma-popularized by Jack Welch at General Electric- is fast becoming fad. You can understand its popularity when you visit any good bookshop. TQM(Total Quality Management) and TPM(Total Productive Maintenance) are most sought after by manufacturing companies such as TVS Group and Hindustan Lever.

Lean Manufacturing and Kaizen have also been practiced by many small and big manufacturing companies. Design for manufacturability or assembly concept, concurrent engineering, Quality Function Deployment, and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis have been used in new product and process development to cut down the time of introduction of the product in the market. Latest that is being talked quite a lot are Knowledge Management Tools and Technologies.

I strongly feel that these tools and techniques must form a part of our education system at much earlier stages and not in professional training stages. We must go for some good text books on the subjects with local examples that can be base for teaching the younger generation at school and college levels for all streams of education.

- Indra

Category: Employment/Education |