According to a speech delivered by Tata Steel managing director Dr JJ Irani, the company has set a target of moving from the band of 550/650 to 650/750 and efforts towards this end have already been started.

The company has already achieved a score of 616 and today, it is the only winner of the coveted JRDQV award among the 80-and-odd companies. The score has enabled Tata Steel emerge the lowest-cost steel producer in the world at an operational cost of $140-145 per tonne of hot roll coils.

Earlier, Tata Steel was on par with the lowest-cost producer Posco, and now that the cost has been further brought down, it has emerged as the lowest-cost producer.

The company has embarked upon various initiatives for cutting costs, both at the operational and functional levels. Besides cutting costs at various levels like cost of conversion, cost of raw material, fuel rate in blast furnace and mining of coal, it has undertaken several HR inititives to promote awareness of the restructuring programme. This includes the programme of awareness, integration and excellence. Further, the company has put in place annual quality improvement plans, quality management structure and ISO 9000 specifications. In order to make employees aware of the success stories, the company designed an organisation structure, whereby there is an epic council with the managing director, executive director and senior executives as members, followed by quality councils, quality sub-councils and departmental councils.

The design was aimed at creating a clear communication flow in the organisation, specifically passing the information relevant to a particular area in a specific department through scorecards to the people who are actually doing the job. Right-sizing of manpower has also been effected on a continuous basis.

To emphasise on performance excellence, the company has been focusing on knowledge management, through total organisational performance initiator like the new ISO 14000 - the new specification that deals with environment - while ISO 9000 deals with business processes.

The Tata Steel restructuring can be aptly regarded as an attempt towards process excellence which involves all employees and customers. This is because whatever is achieved from process excellence gets fed into value mission and strategy development, making it a self-rectifying sort of cycle.