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Combining the best practices of the US and Japanese companies that had won Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Awards, has enabled Tisco to come up with its own variant of business practices. A unique feature in the leadership category is the MD's balanced scorecard: it has been introduced as a tool to translate the company's overall strategy into measurable action plans. It helps the MD monitor current score of particular category against the target score for the year and is totally aligned to the categories and items mentioned in the TBEM. Starting with the MD, the scorecard is deployed at each successive level in the organisation to vice-presidents to General Managers (GMs) right upto the department heads. Each Vice-President-scorecard had to be aligned to the respective parameters of the MD's scorecard. Thereafter, key performance measures were identified that ensured organisational effectiveness and evaluation and improvement was monitored every quarter by the MD. Of course, there were support systems that ensured that what is done at the apex quality council level trickled down to the shopfloor. One of the key support systems for the business excellence model is the quality structures. These consist of apex quality council chaired by the MD under which come the nine quality councils each chaired by Vice-Presidents and GMs. Thirty-six quality sub-councils chaired by GMs, DGMs, AGMs reported to quality councils. A level below are departmental review committees chaired by head of departments, while quality coordinators of each department comprise the lowest rung. The quality coordinators meet the MD once in two months, providing a system by which the MD can cross-check gaps in the process. As part of the quality structure, Tata Steel also has joint works quality committee with 1,082 quality circles under it. In fact, JWQC is a unique system enabling the management and the workers to thrash out the details regarding interpretation of any plan before embarking on its implementation. How is it integrated? Every Vice-President, quality sub-councils, and department review committees review their scorecard in quality council, every three months, two months, and every month, respectively. The TQM group monitors the linkages between each layer of the quality structure, and all the quality initiatives taken up in the company are integrated with its strategic goals. All aimed at performance excellence and quality. Says Irani who does about 20 dinners every year, meeting customers at 15 to 20 locations in India and abroad: "Good quality establishes two-way long-term relationship. If a material is rejected, we would lose a client and that would cost us much more." True, the cost of bad quality is much more than the effort involved towards quality. Any downside? Yes and no. Says Irani: "We have become more straight-jacketed. But it allows the entire company to move in the same direction at the same time. And an army is bound to perform better than an individual soldier." Today, at Tata Steel it's an army charging towards the next target---625. But surely that won't be the end of its journey either. |
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