Bhushan Raina has used the Tata Business Excellence Model template to engineer a turnaround of the Tinplate Company of India

Quality could well be Bhushan Raina’s calling card. It is an attribute the managing director of the Tinplate Company of India (TCIL) has used to remarkable effect while scripting a turnaround of the company.

In 1997, when Mr Raina took over the reins at TCIL, the company was suffering losses of Rs 5 crore a month and there was talk of divesting the business. The story of its revival has the usual ingredients (perseverance, vision, hard work and outstanding leadership), and one unusual one: help from the group by way of the Tata Business Excellence Model, a framework by which Tata companies can achieve, and be measured for, standards of business excellence.

For Mr Raina, TCIL is the latest stop in a 32-year career with the Tata Group that has spanned functions ranging from production and maintenance to marketing and international trade. An engineering and management graduate, he has also completed a general management programme at CEDEP (INSEAD), France. Prior to joining TCIL, Mr Raina was the director for international trade at Tata Steel.

Mr Raina speaks here to Sujata Agrawal about how he helped transform TCIL’s fortunes. Excerpts from the interview:

TBEM as an instrument of change
TCIL had been written off within the Tata Group after making losses of Rs 62 crore in 1997-98. I found when I came here that this was the right place to start the pursuit of total quality. My senior colleagues were wondering what was going on — the company was on fire and here I was talking of getting started on TBEM. Outsiders, too, looked at me with scepticism, but I was charged with the thought that this model could be a tremendous tool in auditing our systems and processes. The people at TCIL are loyal and committed, but the company was, culturally speaking, archaic in its systems and procedures.

I thought TBEM would bring about a revolution in the organisation. Once we took up it up seriously, the organisation progressed, and we achieved a massive jump last year in the external assessment. We got nowhere near 450 points but we managed an unprecedented jump of over 200 points in 2001. That was highly motivating.

I saw TBEM as an important instrument for change management. TCIL has invested in real training and development of its people and these change agents are really driving the organisation. They understand the model and are completely hooked on to the company’s strategic plan. The first thing we did was take feedback seriously. We were helped in a big way in these last three years by TQMS and, of course, Tata Steel, which was our role model.

Areas of change
The first area of change was in leadership. We have, over the last four years, brought clarity to the vision and definition of our business, and we have communicated these across the organisation. The real challenge was in getting our people to understand the business they are in.

Earlier our people thought TCIL was in the business of making tinplate; our mindset was that we were just a downstream unit of Tata Steel. We did not understand that we were part of the packaging industry, that our competition was not another tinplate company but plastic and paper and glass. There was quite a bit of dissonance when I first started talking about this; it was very difficult to get everybody on board.

Once we communicated the vision and definition of our business to the union and our employees, we had to talk about the strategy goals of the organisation. When we got this in order, the focus shifted to designing the full system and then working on deployment.

The second area for change was human resources. We did away with old practices and introduced pay-for-performance processes, new appraisal systems, and employee surveys. As part of our corporate responsibility, we worked on eliminating employee concerns and pains. We concentrated, at the executive and employee level, on motivating our people.

The customer angle
Our company supplies tinplate to can makers, who in turn make the cans and sell them to companies such as Nestle, Amul and Britannia. We talked to the can makers about working together with us, and we now have a strategic alliance with them with the setting up of the Tinplate Promotion Council. We got them to understand that if we did not give Amul, Nestle and others tinplate packaging solutions that were better and more cost-effective than competing packaging solutions, then they would not buy your can or my tinplate.

Tinplate is among the best packaging material for edibles, but it hasn’t taken off in India. Our country’s per capita consumption is among the lowest in the world. The per-person consumption of tinplate in developed countries is about 10 kg a year, and in China, which has an economy similar to ours, it is 1 kg per person. In India it is a mere 0.3 kg. There is great opportunity here; we can expand to seven to eight times our present size in a time span of eight to 10 years.

We are completely reorganising our marketing division this year to focus on market development and on being a solutions provider. We decided back in 1997 that exports would be a crucial part of our marketing drive, and this has resulted in TCIL currently exporting 15 to 20 per cent of its produce. Today we are in 12 markets in South East Asia and West Asia.

The exports angle has significantly changed our company’s outlook. There has been a lot of learning involved; we have tried to capture that knowledge and it has had a salutary effect on the overall cultural change that we wanted to bring about in TCIL. Exports are not as profitable as domestic sales, but it enables you to tackle expansion programmes with confidence, and it gives you access to many markets.

Keeping employees in the loop
We have a joint divisional council through which important issues are communicated to employees. But if you have to drive excellence you can’t have just a business council; it has to be deployed further down. And that is what we are doing, communicating down to all levels of employees and helping them change their mindsets.

We had to get our union on board [during the restructuring process] and we spent a lot of time on training and communication. Every year we have a quality excellence night — it’s like an Oscars night — where we recognise good work done in promoting excellence in the company.

We are also investing time in deploying change at the grass-root level. We are now following the ‘total plant management’ concept, a Japanese idea that tells you how to look after machines and how to drive excellence in preventive maintenance.

Reaching 600 points on the TBEM scale
Our first target is 450 points and I think we will be disappointed if we don’t reach that by 2003. If that happens, getting to 600 points will take another two years. We have done a lot of work on fundamentals. We were very weak and had nothing to show really, but we took this as an opportunity to remodel our processes. Now it’s a question of improving this on a continual basis.

TBEM has been the most important vehicle for the massive turnaround in TCIL. Our people did not understand it earlier, but today it is well communicated across the organisation. We are looking at the TBEM framework as a correction tool that can help us align our processes with, and integrate them to, our vision and our strategic goals. Our degree of involvement, as far as TBEM is concerned, is very high.

The tinplate edge
The packaging that nature provides is the ideal. Coconut water, for example, cannot be better packaged. What we are trying to say is that, with tinplate packaging, what you have inside stays as good as the coconut water inside the coconut. And tinplate is environment-friendly — you melt it in a furnace and it’s ready for recycling.

Uploaded in June 2002