10-12 August 2006
The Group Annual Day celebrated at Sanmar was replete with edutainment and fanfare. This was the day that brought to the spotlight the top performers at The Sanmar Group.
At the locations, performance excellence by employees was lauded and senior management interacted with the people sending out positive messages. At Chennai, the two day sessions featured an array of speakers and presentations. The management presentations delivered by the MDs of the businesses focussed on the strategies that would springboard the businesses on to an accelerated growth path in the years ahead.
The Deputy Chairman spelt out his vision of making Sanmar a one billion dollar group in the next fi ve years.
R Gopalakrishnan
Executive Director,
Tata Sons Ltd
R Gopalakrishnan presented a unique concept in decision making, ‘The Role of Intuition and Analysis in Management Decisions’. According to him, intuition and analysis play complementary roles in decision-making.
At a suitable point in time the baton is passed on from analysis to intuition. The key to a manager’s challenge in making right decisions is to morph analysis into intuition at a suitable time.
Raju V Kanoria
Chairman & Managing Director,
Kanoria Chemicals & Industries Ltd.
Raju V Kanoria’s presentation rang a familiar chord as he talked about the challenges of running a family-owned business and the conscious focus on
professional management. He dealt with change to a productive culture from a family culture without sacrifi cing oneness in the organisation. He recounted the evolution of his business, the strategies that worked, the ideologies that kept his organisation’s DNA intact.
Adil Zainulbhai
Managing Director,
McKinsey & Co, India
‘Opportunities in Manufacturing in India – Getting to World Class’. Adil Zainulbhai’s presentation analysed the manufacturing opportunities in India and highlighted the actual reasons for the manufacturing success in China – that of strong fundamentals, sound economic policies, activity and scale, huge domestic demand resulting in a great price advantage combined with high productivity and investments.
To make it to being world class, companies must build a culture of continuous improvement by creating a system, whereby every year you grow on what you’ve achieved.
Marti Subrahmanyam
Professor-Finance & Economics,
New York University
Marti Subrahmanyam talked about ‘Venturing Abroad - Issues of Globalisation of Indian Companies’. His presentation covered the challenges of globalisation, the need for globalisation in today’s competitive environment, characteristics of global companies, the India advantage and the India-China comparison.
Anita Ramachandran
Chief Executive Offi cer,
Cerebrus Consultants
Anita Ramachandran touched upon HR’s ‘Challenges of Managing in a High Growth Environment’ and what organisations can do in such an environment. In managing these challenges and the issue of attrition, organisations should go beyond the compensation structure and take a relook into management style, the role of a leader and work towards emotional bonding of employees.
P S Jayaraman
Managing Director,
Chemplast Sanmar
" Safety and Health is not a one-stop activity. You can’t just put hardware into it. It has to be continuously monitored. We have plant level teams to monitor on a day to day basis."
The theme of P S Jayaraman’s presentation was Safety Health & Environment (SHE). He took the audience through the various hierarchical levels of dedicated personnel managing SHE activities and his direct involvement in these on a daily basis. Chemplast is moving towards conversion to membrane-based technology and has OHSAS initiatives at various stages of completion across its facilities. Efforts are on to develop the Vedaranyam Bird Sanctuary in association with an NGO, the Bombay Natural History Society. The community building activities in education and health continue with several public health camps managed by dedicated company doctors. Chemplast is focussed on its aim to be the fi rst chemical company to achieve zero discharge at all its facilities and continues its journey with the motto “Care for the Environment.”
P Natarajan
Managing Director,
Sanmar Engineering Corporation (SEC)
" India is getting increasingly important to all international companies including our JV partners.As a result of this, strong JV engagement is taking place across the organisation. The challenge of the management is to orchestrate this in such a way that there is open and free interaction without creating any misunderstanding. "
‘Operational Excellence through Total Employee Involvement’ The presentation by P Natarajan highlighted the huge growth opportunities and the need to develop execution excellence to capitalise on this opportunity. SEC has launched several initiatives to streamline operations and improve customer service levels. Among the several initiatives at SEC towards excellence the highlight was the ‘Service Blitz’ initiative driven all across SEC. Service Blitz is ‘accelerated service’ to customers by a team of sales, service and application engineers who identify and rectify the hidden pain areas of the customer.
5S, Lean and Six Sigma are being driven across SEC with full involvement at all levels. Among the employee involvement initiatives an interesting one was the outbound learning sessions which helped create stretch goals to take employees to a new high in involvement.
Vijay Sankar Deputy Chairman, The Sanmar Group
Vijay Sankar’s presentation on the 2nd day of the Group Annual Day program projected the road ahead for Sanmar in the next 5 years
and the challenges and opportunities in getting there. The year 2005-06 was a good year and the group did well by maintaining focus on profi tability. The group is poised for accelerated growth in the next 5 years. There are no constraints for strong organic growth rates as the group is positioned to leverage the large capital investments from the past and those that are underway. The growth will come from newer allied areas and expansion of all its businesses. As for the readiness for spearheading and managing this growth, there are several factors that are in our favour. Our strong leadership bandwidth, technology platforms, strong fi nancial fundamentals and the ability to react quickly will facilitate a lot of this growth. More importantly, our reputation in fi nancial and employee markets and our strong bindings with our JV partners will fuel the growth. Factors essentially in favour of the Sanmar growth momentum are our 4 + 1 Ps-
Process – our strong process orientation
Place – the advantage of being able to compete globally out of a strong base in India
Product – The niche product range and added price advantage
Profitability – The focus on profi tability
People – The most important ‘P’ factor, the people strength and leadership to take the growth forward.
Cruising along this growth trajectory, we would have to clear the path of challenges and hurdles to keep up the momentum. Externally the market is vibrant, but internally, our execution will be dramatically challenged. Continuous improvement is essential for operational excellence. There has to be a strong commitment to growth with a total buyin from the people of the organisation who will make it happen. A change in mindset towards the changing marketplace with businesses getting far more global will place Sanmar well on overdrive and reaching the 1 billion dollar mark within fi ve years is an easily achievable target.
“At Sanmar, we do not rest on assumptions; we always question them. We need to percolate this line of questioning down the organisation. The way the world is evolving, assumptions on business conditions change rapidly and we need to constantly ask ourselves, are we doing the right thing ”
N Sankar
Chairman
" I’ m convinced that ultimately good management is basically common sense rigorously and properly implemented. "
M N Radhakrishnan
Director - Co-ordination and Review
"
For an organisation to be successful, it has to build
trust and faith amongst its stakeholders, build meaningful relationships. "
B Natraj
Director - Corporate
conducting the interactive sessions
Various groups drawing up action plans.