The Hindu : Tisco launches ASPIRE to achieve excellence

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, May 03, 2003

Business

Business

Tisco launches ASPIRE to achieve excellence

JAMSHEDPUR MAY 2. Tata Iron and Steel Company Limited (Tisco) today launched its ambitious ASPirational Initiatives to Retain Excellence (ASPIRE) to accelerate its quality improvement programmes and reach a net profit level of Rs. 1,000 crores to become Economic Value Addition (EVA) positive by 2007.

"Over the past 7 or 8 years, a series of quality improvement programmes had been started that are moving at a reasonable pace, but now we want to accelerate the pace through ASPIRE to become EVA positive and for that we have to improve ourselves at all stages of production,'' the Tisco Managing Director, B. Muthuraman, told reporters.

ASPIRE seeks to unleash the creative potential of all its employees through a combination of the best practices and improved methodologies, he said.

All these initiatives were aimed at reaching a net profit level of Rs. 1,000 crore, the level of profit the company should achieve for reaching an optimum level of returns on all its investments, at an average global steel price of $240 per tonne, Mr. Muthuraman said.

Justifying the rationale behind introducing ASPIRE, the MD said it was due to their various quality improvement programmes that they had managed to report a net profit of Rs. 205 crores in 2001-02 when all the steel companies in the country had reported losses due to a steep decline in prices. Tisco was among the five companies worldwide to have reported profit that year.

"If we calculate our 2001-02 net profit on the basis of five year average hot rolled steel price of $240 per tonne, the profit would have been in the region of Rs. 400 crores and it was all possible due to our various initiatives,'' he said.

"Our objective is to become EVA positive on our own effort and irrespective of what the steel price is, but at present there is a gap of about Rs. 500-600 crores in reaching that level. Our effort is to become EVA positive on average price and very few companies in the world had the conviction and courage to work towards covering that gap. For that we need to run faster and ASPIRE is one of the new vehicles in that direction,'' he said. Asked to comment on 2002-03 profits, Mr. Muthuraman said if calculated at an average HR prices, their profit for the last fiscal could be in the region of Rs. 600 crores.

Giving details of the initiative, he said, the programme combined some of the well-proven techniques of improvement such as total productive maintenance — the Japanese technique of total employee involvement by complete ownership of equipment and work process.

ASPIRE had also combined the best practices of six sigma, TOP, suggestion management, quality circles and even the Tata group's total business excellence model into the new programme, he said.

The MD said learning from their success of using trained facilitators in the TOP programme, they had decided to extensively train about hundred middle management executives as Black Belts and TPM co-ordinators to work as full time facilitators of the ASPIRE programme.

Mr. Muthuraman said the company was also inviting the guru of Value Innovation, Chan Kim of INSEAD university, to kick-off value innovation projects in Tata Steel and was drawing a three year rolling programme for ASPIRE to draw out the creative potential of the employees when they could contribute to the achievement of its Vision-2007. — PTI

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