XIMB Organises Seminar on Operational Excellence in Service Sector

XIMB Organises Seminar on Operational Excellence in Service Sector - Ashwamedh 2006
Post-event Press-release

Mr. John Mathews of HDFC-Asset Management was the next to speak. According to him, fast and cut-throat competition is what keeps us on the edge. Customer expectations have to be met at all times and in a consistent manner and if one can achieve this, it is a testimony to all the levels of delivery in the entire value chain.

He pointed out to the audience that while stepping out from the virtual world to the real world, one must remember that the customer is always the king and there is no place in the market for a business that does not have a cutting-edge service component. An able entrepreneur must always strive to build businesses that are truly world-class. These businesses should be points of constant discovery and surprises for the customer. Brands that have generation value should be the focus of every businessman. For maintaining operational excellence, one must thus have a combination of true leadership, state-of-the-art systems, highly-trained and motivated staff, a participatory process of management, and an extremely efficient organizational network.

He went on to add that there are no road maps for organizational success. It is experience, awareness and learning that define what an organization grows to become. In his opinion, in the future it will be the ability to manage change that will determine a particular business' operational excellence. He concluded by saying that India is recognized today for a variety of reasons and this race will be complete only through the empowerment of its people, possible by intellectual enquiry and relentless pursuit of excellence.

Mr. Vijay Narsapur, VP Operations at Transworks, who was the penultimate speaker, highlighted the lack of operational excellence in the IT sevices sector in India and how this could be brought about. He focused on the service sector in the Indian IT Industry and proposed a model to reach excellence in operations as opposed to mere management, which is the current scenario. He mentioned how the services sector was rapidly gaining importance in different economies around the world and then went on to talk about how excellence was imperative in this industry. Customer experience and reliable delivery continue to be key areas among service providers and they are the areas requiring reliable models delivering excellence. Traditional Operations Management as followed in the manufacturing sector has very well defined parameters of quality and established systems to maintain the required standards. The IT industry too has deterministic processes and quality models stress on the right process to attain high standards.

The ITES sector on the other hand is totally different because quality here would be more probabilistic, since human beings cannot be made to behave in a consistent or repeatable manner. He then pointed out the characteristics of various excellence models for the ITES industry in India which included world class training, development of specific expertise, compensation as a function of results and behavior, more transparency in goal setting and much more. He concluded by mentioning the various reasons as to why organizations stray away from excellence.

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Contributed by -
Rohit Verma,
Coordinator, IlluminatiX,
The XIMB Media and PR Cell,
Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.

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