MUMBAI, March 8: Picture this: rising raw material prices, market penetration that has reached saturation, and no signs of growth. The bleak scenario sums up the woes of the toilet soaps industry which is stagnant at a annual growth level of three per cent. ``In such a case, it is not price which plays such a great role, it is product quality management,'' warns consultant and advisor-IMC Quality Cell (Indian Merchants' Chamber) PK Banerjee.Speaking on `Modern Concept of Quality Management for Business Excellence' at the Scodet Asia-99 seminar, Banerjee, formerly with Hindustan Lever, reiterated that no business could be run successfully without a consumer focus.
``Any business should run like a wheel. The rim is business effectiveness (profit, growth, etc.). The core consists of process focus, consumer focus and employee focus, which are inter-dependent. And leadership forms the spokes of the wheel that connect the core to the rim,'' said Banerjee highlighting the wheel model for managingquality.
Banerjee added that the cost of poor quality in products, starting from the raw material stage to the finished goods stage, on an average is 20 per cent in the country. ``There is a huge task ahead to improve upon this and this can be effectively done through quality management,'' he said.
The question then is how to take care of the cost of poor quality? Banerjee's prescription for norms which could lead to better management:
Move over from a vertical organisation to a horizontal one. Organisations should become more horizontal in functioning where the CEO is not the be-all and end-all. Leadership should be cooperative. Leadership should change from being autocratic, as was the case more than a decade ago, to cooperative leadership. No one person can take the credit for success and no one person should be blamed for a failure. The focus of any organisation should be the consumer and not profit. Consumer focus will in turn, lead to profitability. Motivation shouldchange from self-serving to real altruism.Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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