Business Today Net Special

Tisco: The Quality Champion

By Roshni Jayakar & Rakhi Mazumdar

Related Stories

Walk into Tata Iron and Steel Company's (Tisco) sprawling plant in Jamshedpur, and ask even a janitor what Q in the posters and banners put up all over the plant stands for. "Quality," will be the prompt reply. That, then, is the measure of Tisco's success with the quality movement it launched 10 years ago. More recently, the 93-years-old company became the first of the Tata Group's 107-odd companies to win the prestigious JRD-QV Award for excellence in quality.

That's no small achievement for a company that employs roughly 60,000 workers, is the second-largest steel producer in the country, and used to operating in a protected market. Indeed, as the Group Chairman Ratan Tata, 63, noted on July 29, 2000, while addressing senior managers of the group: "Tata Steel was the last company that could have achieved the award. But Jamdesh (J. Irani) led the exercise and did a remarkable job of transforming the company and changing with the need of the times."

Says Irani, 64, Managing Director, Tisco: "We started on the journey 10 years ago, when the economy had changed. We realised that we have to change to modern way of making steel competitively and change the attitude of our people." But how was Tisco to know that quality awareness had actually pervaded every nook and corner of its steel empire? It set up a simple yardstick: quality would be considered having taken roots when each of its employees---even the humble jamadar---could answer the two questions: What does golden Q stand for? And what can you, as an employee, do to (enhance) quality?

The Journey Begins

Just how did Tata Steel go about its quality movement? First, it looked at the G blast furnace, one of the oldest units. The programme meant change of mindset, looking at cost as a tool for survival, and satisfying internal and external customer. First it entered into a three-year collaboration with Nippon Steel, the Japanese steel-maker known for its operational efficiency, to help in the process. The furnace started using imported coal in coke- making process. Doing so not only reduced the fuel cost, but also increased the productivity of the furnance from 1.01 million tonnes of hot metal in 1993-94, to 1.30 million tonnes in 1999-2000. Consequently, the cost of saleable steel came down by about Rs 350 per tonne. Says D.N. Jha, Senior Divisional Manager: "For the company, this exercise was not a matter of choice but an imperative for survival."

In terms of productivity, the total operational programme (TOP) enabled G blast furnace achieve production levels of 3,600-3,700 tonnes hot metal per day on a consistent basis, as against 3,233 tonnes per day earlier. The fuel rate was brought down from 610 kg per tonne to 570 kg per tonne, by modifying the charging system in the furnace. Similarly, the net coke consumption was cut from 510 kg to 425 kg per tonne. Suggestions for improvements often came from the employees themselves. Partho Chatterjee, Deputy General Manager, relates the example of how a suggestion to use radiation pyrometer to measure hot metal temperature instead of `the conventional probe', resulted in savings of Rs 2,100 per day. While the one-time installation cost of pyrometer was Rs 1 lakh, each cast required three to five probes of Rs 60 each and there were about seven casts daily.

That was at the old unit involving unlearning and learning again. Even in a newer unit, Hot Strip Mill (HSM) it was relatively easy to inculcate quality awareness. The 2 million tpa HSM was chosen as a model for Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), ISO 14001. A number of cost reduction programmes and quality circles were run at the unit simultaneously. The decision to set up CR mill meant that HSM would have to supply HR coils of top quality to the CR mill. Initially, it was tough to produce quality at optimal cost. But finally a total of 156 ideas generated were implemented, resulting in savings of Rs 50.8 crore.

Issue Contents Write to us Subscriptions Syndication