TATA STEEL Tata Steel (TS), founded in 1907, stands proud as a modern integrated steel plant, comparable with

any integrated steel plant in the world. In spite of being one of the oldest establishments, it is now regarded as one of the front-runners in India towards becoming a total quality organization as evident in its receipt of Business Excellence award conferred by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). It has an annual turnover of about Rs. 7,000 crores. Its core business is steel through its total value chain i.e. from mining of raw materials to marketing of steel products.. Its crude steel making capacity presently stands at 3.4 million tones per annum. Presently its manpower strength is about 50,000. Though TS had passed thought challenging times during 1980s and 1990s, it has turned corner during the recent years. It has now acquired market leadership in most of the market segments that it has chosen to operate. Annual turnover has been increasing at the rate of 10% even in the face of slow market growth. In the year of 1999-2000, it has achieved 50% increase in profit after tax over the previous year. Export turnover is also growing. It is now globally recognized as one of the most cost competitive steel making units.

Steel business both in domestic and international markets has now become highly competitive one due to several factors. . In order to meet such challenges, TS has been undertaking modernization in phases. Earlier phases had seen infusion of new technology along with expansion of manufacturing capacities. The current phase of modernization that the company has been passing through during the last few years is considered to be toughest one. This phase involves modernization of minds of people to stimulate creative thinking, thereby accelerating the process of Change across the organization. TS is functionally divided and hierarchically configured in terms of its organization structure. It is professionally managed with the help of a vast network of systems and procedures. However, a sense of urgency for change has prevailed upon over the current few years. Actions at different levels are increasingly shaped by companys well-articulated vision and strategic objectives that are widely communicated. Table 1 lists down the vision and the strategic goals that drive a large number of initiatives that are currently being pursued.

Table 1: Vision and strategy of Tata Steel

Tata

Vision Steel enters

the

Strategic goals new Create a culture learning

of and

millennium with the confidence of continuous leaning, knowledge based and a change happy organization

We will establish ourselves as the Achieve world class status supplier of choice by delighting in services and products our customers with our services and our products Reach the position of the In the coming decade, we will most cost competitive steel become the most cost competitive producer. steel plant and so serve the community and the nation others will follow. The top management shares the vision with all employees of the organization through dialogues, union management meetings, joint departmental committees, etc. A set of cross functional teams formed at different levels and headed by a Apex Quality Council steer through the movement of changes. The Apex Quality Council has developed the Balanced Score Card based management reporting system, addressing the expectations of all key stakeholders. It is monitored at the level of MD (Managing Director Establish industry Where Tata Steel ventures --- leadership

i.e. CEO of the organization). This comprises 12 key performance measures, derived from the four strategic goals. These have been deployed down to the operational levels through the quality Councils/Quality Sub-Councils/Departments and to individual officers, as their Key Result Areas (KRAs). The company has been building up a strong customer orientation of its employees. It encourages every employee to receive and act on feedback from his customers internal or external. The primary approaches to listening and learning include the customer visits by a cross section of employees, ranging from the field officers to the MD. These visits include calls to existing, previous, and potential and competitors customers. Other sources include surveys, seminars, foreign visit, etc. Quality is understood broadly as the Quality of Management in the organization. . Tata Business Excellence Model (TBEM) drives quality management structure .Its progress towards such total quality approach through periodical review and reinforcement. . Process concept provides important ingredients in many of the key initiatives. Tata Steel has identified eight key business processes at the highest level of process hierarchy.

Business Process Re-engineering initiative has been targeting at some of the macro-level business processes. Most of the other initiatives center on lower level processes. All the grass-root level operational units have been regrouped with process concept and each of these entities has been analyzed with the help of ISO-9000 based quality management system requirement. Working of these entities has been audited and certified internally or externally. Till now 69 such organizational entities have well documented process structure in place. Tata Steel has a long tradition of applying performance improvement techniques like Method Study, Value Engineering (VE), OR techniques, etc. Such techniques have now been used as a part of Continuous Improvement Programme (CIP)s Increasing use is made of multi-disciplinary improvement teams and task forces for in-depth analysis and problem solving, A well-established performance management system exists across all the employee categories as well as for team initiatives to support high performance. The KRAs of officers are linked with their participation in CIPs. High performance is reinforced by a will laid out compensation and recognition system. Many innovative practices like, Man of the month, evenings with the CEO, etc are adopted to recognize employees of all categories.

The company is well known for its technical and management training and development. All new recruits are given exhaustive induction programmes. Many training and education programmes are also designed keeping in view the career progression needs of all categories of employees. The company has also a long tradition of information sharing across different categories of employees through different newsletters, magazines, posters, etc. Knowledge sharing is also encouraged through organization of seminars, conferences, workshops etc that often involves participation of outsides processionals. Of late, the company is encouraging knowledge acquisition and sharing through IT enabled knowledge management infrastructure. Discuss the improvement programme institutionalized in the organization