Kaizen’s Operations & Research Entity Presents
CRUSADE 2.0
By Mahesh Hiremath
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EDITOR’SLETTER
“"With Evolution, Changes happen in every part of the world every day, every time."”
Welcome to the eighth edition of “LAKSHYA”, our monthly supplement designed for people who dare to think above the average and believe in connecting the dots. In an age where technology has taken over every sphere, information is abundant and data is omnipresent, we have conspired to bring to you a collection of thoughtfully created and carefully crafted pieces of work by some bright aspiring minds of ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad on the current trends and hot topics in the field of Operations Management and their relevance in different industries. Mahindra’s Crusade 2.0 target to deliver vehicle which is new for 5 years. At the same time, they are taking cost reduction initiative with regular Launches of New products. Nevertheless, they are aligned to market requirement in line with change in technology and regulations with constant focus on people development at core. Mahindra strongly believes in Delivering First Time Right, Every time right & Differentiated Customer experience. We look forward to providing you with some valuable insights and inculcate the passion for reading once again within you all. We hope that you enjoy this first issue and do let us know if there are any topics you’d like to see covered in the future. Please write to us and become a part of this discussion Email ID: kaizenclub.ibs@gmail.com SUHAIL SHAIKH IT HEAD Kaizen – IBS Hyderabad
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CONTENTS
CRUSADE 2.0
04
Being Agile in a Changing World
09
Customer Service with Humans and Chatbots
14
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Crusade 2.0 BY Mahesh Hiremath
DIFFERENTIATED MILESTONE It was a prestigious moment for me, I was representing my company i.e. Happy Forgings Limited, which supplies 4-cylinder crankshaft to M&M Kandivali. It was mid-July, 2017 when we received a mail from Mahindra to send an engineer to be a part for the launch of their much-awaited project Crusade 2.0. We were addressed by Q&A team, and had an interactive session with General Manager Mr. Dhiren Doshi, Deputy Manager Mr. Sachin Deokar.
Mahindra strongly believes in Delivering First Time Right, Every time right & Differentiated Customer experience. They strive that by adopting Crusade 2.0 with target in mind to deliver vehicle which is new for 5 years. At the same time, they are taking cost reduction initiative with regular launches of new products. Nevertheless, they are aligned to market requirement in line with change in technology and regulations with constant focus on people development at core. Crusade 2.0 compromises: • • •
GNOVA- C Global Demerit Cannot Make Cannot flow
The quality of manufactured cars is ensured through a quality check program based on the principles of NOVA - C (New Overall Vehicle Audit - Customer) wherein daily random checks are conducted from a customer’s point of view. Routine calls are also made to Mahindra dealerships to check the quality of cars delivered to them. In this edition, I will brief you about GNOVA-C and how Mahindra and Mahindra are implementing it.
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GNOVA - C
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G NOVA C
CONCERN REPONSE SYSTEM CONCERN
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Being Agile in a Changing World BY Shobhit Sharan
Fifty years ago, planning out the scope of an entire project and locking it in worked because the pace of change was much slower. Teams had time to analyse, design, code, test, and deploy the product before their customer could change their mind. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that all of the inventions that speed thoughts of change started being used by the general marketplace: the personal computer (PC), Internet, email, and cell phones. The speed of communication increased, which increased the speed of knowledge, which drove the speed of change. CAD/CAM systems, object-oriented programming languages, desktop compilers and debuggers, and reverse engineering applications allowed engineers to design and build products faster. But with changing technological advancements, a new approach to product delivery was required in order to take advantage of the technological advances and speed value to market. In 2001, a group of like-minded individuals, each involved in software development projects, gathered at the Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah, USA. These people had been practicing new ways of developing software that allowed them to make changes quickly and easily. The industry media had coined the term “lightweight” software development to refer to their approaches because they were light on documentation and formal process. The individuals who were saddled with this term, however, were not happy with its connotations. The intent of the gathering was to come up with a new name that better described their philosophy and approach to product development. Over the two days they spent together, the group defined a new name—AGILE.
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Agile coming from – “Agility”, is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual.
What is AGILE? AGILE methodology is a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the software development lifecycle of the project. The agile software development emphasizes on four core values. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Individual and team interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan Determining, evaluating and monitoring the processes.
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The Agile Alliance believes that its focus should be on delivering value early, frequently, and continuously. To do this, agile advocates the ongoing daily involvement of the customer or customer representative with the delivery team, as well as frequent deliveries of product increments. In an increasingly challenging environment, Agile can save companies from failure. Here’s why.
Change is the only constant in life Today, we repeatedly see dramatic changes at a macro and micro level, all of which have an impact on the business and public sector environment. That makes Agile approaches ever more critical as they help organizations be more innovative, efficient and effective. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment.
Getting really close to customers All organizations need to invest in understanding their future. But getting closer to your customers through better feedback, analysing the data you already have and connecting different sets can quickly bring valuable insight into how you can continue to meet your customer’s needs as they evolve. Fashion retailer Zara continuously monitors customer preferences and sales patterns to quickly produce new items to replace or replenish and respond to local fashions. The Agile manifesto highlights customer collaboration; the 11 |K A I Z E N ’ S O P E R A T I O N S & R E S E A R C H E N T I T Y
ultimate realization of this is co-creation. DEWALT, Lego, DHL and Made.com are all companies who work with customers to create new products and services.
Respond quickly Decisions need to be made close to where they’re needed. This requires distributed decision-making and close cooperation between those with the skills needed to take effective action. Making members of finance part of the Agile initiatives moves them close to the problems and means they can advise on an ongoing, real-time basis. Other skills that can need aligning are HR, legal and compliance. Over time, these skills become less centralized, more spread across the organization and aligned with value delivery.
Uses a Top Down Approach Agile uses a top-down approach to defining and estimating scope in order to eliminate the waste (time and money) of spending many weeks defining requirement details that may never be implemented or that may outdate by the time the team is ready to build the feature.
Agile projects begin with a clear vision and a backlog of high-level, course-grained features. The most important feature is then broken down into smaller pieces, sometimes called minimally marketable features (MMFs), which are sized so that each can be independently developed in a short timeframe. A group of MMFs can then be bundled into a minimally marketable release (MMR). Releases are planned using the course-grained features and gross-level estimations, then as the team prepares to work on a particular MMF or group of MMFs, planning in detail is done, complete with tasks estimated in hours and/or days.
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The only reason to use a traditional bottom-up approach to defining scope for a project is if it is known at the outset that the requirements will not change. If scope is truly fixed, then there is no need to use the change management models that make up the agile suite of methodologies. Changing requirements will always dog development teams. Agile development gives project teams the platform, culture and tools to manage changing requirements effectively so they can deliver products and services that meet or exceed their customers’ expectations. This is a big part of business success.
The benefits of adopting Agile are clear, with more and more organizations adopting Agile at scale. Forbes and the Harvard Business Review, amongst others, recognize Agile as critical to helping organizations respond to change. So, it’s time to think – how can Agile make a difference to you?
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Customer Service and Chatbots
with
Humans
BY Rayman Kaur
The needs, wants and preferences of customers are rapidly reshaping business in this digital age. With social and mobile technology coming in handy, consumers expect companies to be available online at all times, providing them with superior quality customer experience. These customers expect an omnichannel approach towards interactions. While they require the convenience of online self-service, they also want access to talk to a human agent in case the problems get too confusing or complex. They look for seamless and personalized experiences – whether it requires dealing with making purchases or solving technical glitches- at any point. How can companies balance these hybrid demands for both digital service and human touch? How can they deliver quality customer experience online while keeping costs low? And where can human agents be utilized most effectively?
Human interaction with chatbots
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Powered by artificial intelligence, cognitive agents, are now creating new solutions, where they provide companies with new channels for quick interaction with customers, automation of the back-office process & providing support to human agents. This digitalplus-human touch approach for service and support is at the centre of the outsourced and omnichannel customer experience management created by Teleperformance, the worldwide leader in this industry. Many companies have already incorporated chatbots for providing online service, as the AI enhanced software is capable of quickly answering simultaneous questions on various routine issues faced by customers. This frees up human time & resources. But, despite the growing sophistication of chatbots, the software can’t contextualize data, which is the basic requirement for a human-like conversation. They also can’t provide us with human reasoning needed for diagnosing a customer problem and ultimately finding the right solution. That’s where the Teleperformance technology is targeted, creating a new way where online AI-based cognitive agents collaborate with humans to maximize the companies’ interactions with customers. For example, the customer service cognitive agent for Teleperformance, also known as TP BOT can handle initial inquiries of the customer online since most of these requests are routine and easily understood. When the TP BOT encounters a question that it cannot comprehend, the chat gets passed to a human agent through an automated process flow, allowing the agents to carry on with the conversation from where the
Chatbot integration in businesses
This tag-team effort helps companies in handling larger number of interactions than it could using human workforce alone. TP BOT can also support the agents while they work with the customers. For example, the AI-based customer service cognitive agent has the ability to quickly analyse bulk of customer data and highlight the most relevant details depending on the problem. This helps the human agent to immediately respond without 15 |K A I Z E N ’ S O P E R A T I O N S & R E S E A R C H E N T I T Y
searching multiple sources. With this balanced approach, the companies can focus on solving complex problems without compromising on accuracy or efficiency and in maintaining a personalized touch that consumers want. As the companies think about the future of the customer service, leaders should think about how technology can assist humans in their jobs and not replace them. With hybrids of AI & humans reshaping customer experience, the trend into the future is clear: companies that take advantage of AI’s tremendous potential are likely to flourish, while those that fail to adapt to these changes risk falling behind.
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ABOUT US:
The word “Kaizen”, where “Kai” = change “Zen” = good, simply means “change for better”. In English Kaizen is typically applied to measures for implementing continuous improvement. It is an approach to activity organisation based on common sense, self-discipline, order and economy and is a strong contributor and fundamental part of a lean production process model in lean manufacturing. Kaizen- The Official Operations Club of IBS Hyderabad believes in relishing in the essence of "Constant Change and Evolvement" and hence we, as an organization work willingly for the betterment of the student community. KORE- Kaizen’s Operations and Research Entity, one of our primary wings which flaps to cater to the needs of students and motivate them to soar high by polishing their technical competencies. KORE’s area of expertise includes Case Based Research, Consultancy, Live Projects and Workshops. LAKSHYA, an initiative taken by KORE primarily focuses on the concepts of operations management and various articles based on the day to day operations and logistics of an organisation - SACHIT JAIN
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LAKSHYA is an academic print and is not for any commercial sale. Reliability and Responsibility, for sources of data for the article vests with the respective authors. Please feel free to drop in your suggestions at kaizenclub.ibs@gmail.com KORE: Kaizen’s Operations & Research Entity. Kaizen – The Official Operations Club of IBS Hyderabad All Rights Reserved
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