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Rajita Bansal
JAMSHEDPUR, Jan 27: When the Rs 300-crore diesel engine manufacturing plant of Tata Cummins was set up in July 1995, there were many Cassandras waiting for the project team to stumble. To be sure they had their reasons.
The top management was to introduce a radical management system which did away with the traditional level of first line supervisors. It was also introducing a new concept called Team Based Work System (TBWS) which broke down traditional hierarchies and got the 400-odd operatives (employees) organised into 30 teams with their respective team charter.
And, to top it all, it had chosen a 27-year old Telco manager to head its human resources department. Managers at Jamshedpur, according to a Tata Cummins employee, were totally suspect of this new project which they were told was guided by the principles and practices of the Cummins Production System (CPS) and its customer-led quality initiatives. Today, not only has TCL managed to prove the Cassandras wrong, it has also caught the attentionof other automotive majors like Bajaj Auto and Mahindra & Mahindra who plan to benchmark their work systems against the CPS. According to Subhash AK Rao, general manager (human resources & information technology), ``The visits by these companies have been the best attestation of our work systems.''
Want more tangible testimonials for the success of the CPS? TCL has directly saved nearly Rs 2 crore in the last two years by implementing suggestions of the teams. It has incorporated 43 improvements in its new engine series by activating customer-led quality initiatives. And it received the CII HRD award in the small and medium business category for the year 1997. Consider the best practices that drive TCL:
Team-Based Work Systems
Explains, Tim Solso, CEO, Cummins Engine Company Inc, ``The Cummins' commitment to TBWS has spanned a quarter century and has enabled the company to tap the knowledge and experience of all the employees to make improvements for the customer.'' Accordingly, at TCL, the 30operational teams are self-directed with each having its own team charter clearly identifying the operating guidelines, tasks, measures of success and scope of authority for all. No employee of TCL has a formal job description or trade definition. This, according to Rao, is a first in the heavy engineering industry. At TCL each team has between 8 and 12 associates who can define themselves with making a particular product or providing a service or implementing an improvement idea, at the plant. A quality-point leader manages the team and uses institutionalised methods to do problem-solving. The leaders are interchangeable and meet every week with the other team leaders to interface on issues. This, according to Rao, enables a very quick spread of information and decisions across the plant.
TCL has also done way with foremen and managers and only has "facilitators" at a managerial level. Facilitators are part of the team and keep moving around to facilitate the team process. At TCL, the management hasbroken down hierarchical barriers as there is a basic issue of approach and acceptability which gets integrated through team-based working systems.
Benefits and Rewards
The company has worked out a very interesting reward system which is simply called ``plant-wise gain sharing''. Accordingly, improvements and suggestions incorporated on a daily basis are accumulated and measured against a realistsic operating plan based on a stretch target after each quarter (75 days). Any team which hits the target gets an additional 25 per cent of its basic salary as the reward. Such a scheme, says Rao, has helped even a material store employee to know and measure his contribution at Tata-Cummins.
End-User Customer
TCL found an innovative way to understand customer needs. It sent all its assembly line associates for a three-month stint in the field at dealer points. While the real reason for doing so stemmed from the fact that they were sitting idle due to underutilised capacities at the plant, thestint gave them a good dose of reality. Remembers a TCL associate, ``It made me look at at all my process and objective charts again...it was not a bland chart anymore.'' The stint made TCL discover that its engines were not fitting with the rest of the components of a vehicle specially in relation to the gear box. By solving that problem, TCL could effectively tackle more than 85 per cent of its rejection complaints.
Not surprisingly, TCL balances innovative systems like these with intensive training. No new employee is allowed through the plant unless he has gone through 600 hours of training. More so, once a person is selected by the management to join TCL, it are the teams which meet up with him before deciding which team will he join.
By April 2000, TCL plans to ramp up its plant to its full capacity of making 68,500 engines every year and hitting a turnover of nearly Rs 1,000 crore. More importantly, by this date, TCL will be housing 10 per cent of Cummins' worldwide workforce. Sums up Solso,``Ninety-four per cent of the people involved in worldwide manufacturing (more than 18,000 employees) have been trained in the CPS. In India, it is a continuation of the same philosophy that an assembly line is really team-based manufacturing.''
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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