Tisco departments will, henceforth, have only the operations and projects divisions, casting a shadow over the existence of divisions like Tata Korf Engineeriong Services Ltd.

The engineering company of Tisco was formed from the work force of the maintenance division. With the merger of these maintenance and operations divisions, the need for having its own engineering division has diminished as a large part of the capital goods requirement is being met from imports.

Tisco officials, however, allay fears of a selloff, saying, "As of now there are no plans to this effect". According to them, the merger of the two departments is part of the fundamental cultural changes being initiated at Tisco. "World over, companies are getting leaner and more competitiveand Tisco is also keeping up to the times," sources said.

The other Tisco locations where `Cluster Manning will be implemented are the the hot-strip mill and the coal-rolling mill, bar and rod mill at Jamshedpur, and the bearings division in West Bengal.

Combining the training of employees in the various departments is another area where Tisco plans to streamline its operations. All training programmes will be coordinated, replacing the fragmented training processes.

The training programme will, henceforth, be split into two types-- conceptual training, which emphasises on general development on how to manage the overall business, and activity training, where the employees will be trained on specific trade skills.

For the third successive year, the steel industry was in the grip of recession in fiscal 1999, leading to a 1 per cent reduction in steel consumption.

Tisco, however, achieved a volume growth of 4 per cent by selling 2,940 million tonnes of steel, against 2,821 million tonnes in 1997-98.Despite the higher volume of steel sold, the turnover, including the company's other income, was marginally lower at Rs 6,452.42 crore, compared with Rs 6,516.58 crore in the previous year, as price realisation came under severe pressure due to excess supply conditions prevailing in both the domestic and export markets.

"No longer can we afford to be immune to the changes happening around us. We have to rise up to the competition and make our products cost-effective while maintaining world standards," Tisco officials said.

Move will create multi-skilled work force

Tisco has already stated that it wants to reduce its work force by about 4,000 in the current fiscal. The practical problem in such a huge outgo of employees is that there could be an increase in downtime of machines if there is no skilled person available to run the machine at any particular time. Herein lies the logic in the company's policy of merging the two departments. It will create multi-skilled work force to both run andmaintain the machines, resulting in higher uptime and leading to reduction in cost to the company.