Business Excellence thorugh Value Addition

An engrossing talk was delivered on the afternoon of 12^th February 2008 to the students of VGSOM, IIT Kharagpur by Mr. Siddhartha Dasgupta, Emeritus Quality Expert, Philips Electronics. He spoke to the gathering on “BUSINESS EXCELLENCE THROUGH VALUE ADDITION”.

 He set the keynote for the talk by emphasizing on the way of business excellence and how we must look at businesses from the quality perspective. He went on to talk about the field of Business Analytics, what its role was in today’s businesses and its strategic importance. He cited an interesting example on how the UPS Customer Intelligence Group used business analytics tools to predict customer defections. Students were given an overview of companies which work with “ideal business processes”. Mr. Dasgupta, in a very lucid manner, explained to the audience that such companies know WHAT to make, HOW to make and WHAT to sell and they give due importance to quality in all these aspects.

He delved deep into his immense wealth of experiences and said that what ails most managers today is not the lack of solutions to problems but the lack of knowledge of existence of tools to solve his problems. “You must be aware of what is available to you”, he reiterated. He harped on the intelligent use of business analytics as a smart way of dealing with problems.

Top management orientation, to a large extent, determines where a company is headed. Mr. Dasgupta dwelt on the demand for excellence being enforced by the top management.

 For marketing enthusiasts, he had a word of advice: “Business Processes are among the last remaining points of differentiation to be exploited”.

 He also spoke about lagging (all financial indicators) and leading indicators (people, processes and customers) and their importance to organizations. He also recollected his experiences at Philips and cited examples of how analytics tools helped them rectify problems.

 He presented the concept of the Zero-Defect Flowchart and continued further to talk about how we could make innovation predictable. He also accentuated the importance of retaining talent within an organization. To conclude, he spoke about the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model which talks about achieving results by correct use of enablers.

 At the end of the lecture, VGSOM students were privileged to listen to an authority in the field of quality and get an insight into the signification of quality in the industry today.

        Article courtesy – Kunal Sharma, Final Year, VGSoM.