Management Consulting (MC), Siemens Information Systems Ltd. (SISL) Mumbai
Market Realities
The corporate sector in India has witnessed a period of dynamic change in business operations since the late nineties. The fundamental rules of business have been rewritten due to technological and market pressures. The impact of globalization has been felt by almost every sector in India; customers are getting increasingly better informed and levels of product and service delivery are being constantly pushed up. In this scenario, companies need to adopt strategies that will yield real and swift results. These market realities have greatly influenced the role of management consulting.
Management consultants have been forced to revise their approach as companies have begun to demand real and quick results. Consulting assignments, until recently, were system-based and focused on processes. Consultants were judged purely on the basis of the changes made to enable process automation and functional synergy in organizations.
A look inside SISL MCS
The SISL MC division has been engaged in consulting assignments in the areas of:
- Business Process Re-engineering
- IT strategy, and
- Other consulting services
Responding to the changed market environment and internal dynamics, we launched the Theory of Constraints (TOC) practice in 2001. It was clear that the practice and implementation of TOC was an area which larger consulting firms would hesitate to enter, given the proprietary nature of the TOC methodology. Over a period of two years, the SISL MCS team developed competencies for creating and delivering solutions based on the TOC line of thought while the re-engineering skills developed earlier helped SISL MCS sustain itself.
The TOC philosophy encompasses four business areas of any organization:
- Operations
- Supply Chain and Distribution
- Project Management, and
- Solutions for Sales
The TOC concepts were further leveraged by Dr. Goldratt to create a Viable Vision offer for organizations. The promise of the offer was to “bring a company to have, in less than four years, net profit equal to its current total sales”.
Benefits
The following factors determine the success of TOC assignments:
- TOC concepts demand a “holistic and systematic” approach to
corporate excellence
- Approach and methodology are implementation-oriented
- Clear benefits are envisaged and business performance
measured and compared (pre- and post-TOC)
- Engagements adopt a benefit-linked compensation plan that
quantifies benefits and links the fees to achievement of the
benefits
- Core methodology of TOC is fundamentally applicable to any
organizational set-up with challenges in production, distribution
or project management