tata.com: What is the procedure for volunteering to become an internal assessor?
GJ: As of now we are requesting CEOs to identify high performers and nominate them for the internal assessors programme. We have about 600 people trained by us for both internal and external assessment. There isn’t much difference in these programmes, except that the emphasis in the external programme is on having a deeper understanding of the business.

We give the participants special inputs on strategy development processes as well as on consensus management: how a team of six people arrives at a consensus, how a site visit is planned, etc. In external assessments, you are from outside the industry you are going to assess. For internal assessments there are fewer issues, since you are assessing your own company.

tata.com: What is the process of certifying assessors?
GJ: There are several tests conducted over six stages. Of the 600 people we have trained only 50 per cent have passed the tests. Our aim is clear: we want only those who have scored 70 per cent or more in the tests. We trained 250 people for the external assessor’s programme and we could get only 96 for the 17 companies we are assessing this year.

tata.com: What is the role and strategic objectives of TQMS? And have you added any value to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality model?
GJ: The mission of TQMS is to drive business excellence within the group. Our goal is to be the organisation that enables Tata companies achieve industry leadership. The group has stated that we should be No 1 or 2 in any given industry, or not be in it at all.

If we are to be industry leaders then TQMS must be able to drive business excellence in the group. We have to get commitments from CEOs by inviting them to be mentors, to be chairman of the regional forum networks that we have set up. TQMS also organises and leads study missions abroad. All of these, taken together, will bring in the best practices from world class companies. CEOs with a good understanding of the model will be able to implement them well in their companies. The cumulative effort will help us attain leadership positions.

We are working with the group’s human resources division on evolving a framework that recognises the contributions of assessors. The reward will not necessarily be monetary; it will be recognition of a job well done.

We also have training programmes on service quality and internal customer orientation. If the entire organisation is aligned and driven by customer orientation, then it is focused on the customer. TBEM is nothing but bringing about change management in a company. It is not a prescriptive model; as long as it delivers results and the approach, deployment and results are all aligned and integrated, then there is no problem.

A big step that TQMS has taken is the mentoring process. When we talk of assessment, we involve only the assessors. The maturity of understanding the business comes from being at a more senior level. This year, for the first time, we introduced for each of the applicant companies one or two mentors, depending on the seriousness of the case. The higher the score bands, the more mentors had pitched in. The CEOs also benefit — by looking at different industry practices, by learning about that industry’s best practices. Mentoring is a strategic intervention here.

At the annual convention, which is kicked-off by the top management, we have all the assessors as well as the mentors and the CEOs of our group companies. We invite world-class speakers to come and share the best business practices from across the world

tata.com: What are TQMS’s strategic objectives for the next two years?
GJ: To help our group companies shift the score bands. This means we should enhance our customer value management, improve the assurance process and help companies address their opportunities for improvement. Internally, TQMS has to improve its own processes. For example, we need to further improve the assessment process. A lot of improvements have taken place this year in the assessment process: we increased the number of assessors in each team and, hence, objectivity has increased. The levels of acceptance of passing in the external assessor’s programme have been raised to make the assessment process rigorous.

We have organised ourselves in a manner whereby each TQMS consultant has a group of companies to cater to. There are presently about 60 business units to look at. We are internally organising ourselves in terms of improving our competency and have identified training programmes for ourselves. We want to become the benchmarking clearing house for the group. It will take at least 18 months.

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Uploaded in July 2003