With the onset of digital transformation of everything around, Puneesh Lamba explains how the CK Birla Group of companies decided to disrupt themselves & others and accept and adapt to the change, rather than waiting for others to disrupt them.
Entire world seems to be undergoing a digital transformation. Digital Transformation is the buzzword across boardrooms. Across CK Birla groups of companies are you undergoing a digital transformation as well?
See, Digital Transformation is inevitable. These days, with the consumer expectation and the advent of connected devices and platforms, there is a continuous digitization of manufacturing & other processes and the industry is continuously evolving in response to the challenge of ensuring the delivery of right products at the right time and to the right person. So, the customers now expect that the products are intuitive and easy to interact with. On the production side, no longer companies have to sacrifice quality for efficiency, because the AI algorithms help them understand the factors that are impacting the quality and efficiency and those can then be fixed very fast. So, Going Digital is the theme for us. We started our digital journey around 2 years back in an organized manner and it has till now been a very successful endeavor for us. Since the group is very diversified in terms of industries we are present in, we did not follow a cookie cutter approach for all companies and engaged niche partners who together with our teams helped us design the digital journey and the digital transformation roadmap for companies. One thing we were clear from the start that there cannot be a separate digital strategy and the only strategy we will follow is Business Strategy where we will use digital means to further it. So, the nextgen digital technologies have helped us achieve our business strategy more effectively.
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“The longer any organization or an individual takes to digitally transform themselves, the harder it becomes to excel or even survive in the industry”
Puneesh Lamba
VP & Group CIO
CK Birla Group
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Can you tell us how far you have reached along this digital transformation journey?
This is a journey, there are milestones, but I cannot say that we have completed our journey. As I said, we started with two companies and then we expanded to four companies and now we are looking at more companies this year. The companies that started two years back, they are now more mature in the journey and have started reaping the fruits wherein the companies who have just joined have started realizing that this will have definite and quantifiable benefits, though it will take some time. For example, in one of the companies we were able to reduce the rejection rate by 75% using a combination of IoT and AI technologies. The beauty of that solution was that nobody at the shop-floor was getting to know that there was an action being taken by technology, because AI was making decisions based on the data collected by IoT sensors. There is another company wherein we sell mining and construction equipment, these equipments work in a very tough areas and just a few hours downtime can bring a loss in lakhs for the customers. We deployed IoT sensors in the machines to measure certain parameters, started analyzing them and report back to the customers. Also, we had a control room wherein we could see all the machines working and could figure out what the probable problems can be. These services help us get an EXTRA annual amount that is contributing to our topline and bottomline. Further, we are using augmented reality in couple of ways. One is in training; this is the assisted production as we say. We have the cameras on top, guiding the people in the assembly line to take the next step. The pictures are beamed on the table and people can see what the next action is, it also watches whether they are taking the right action or not. If the action is wrong, it will beep and ask you to do it again and tell you how it has to be done. So that is helping us reduce our quality issues and improve our speed and productivity. There are many more examples like this.
You have spoken about greater efficiencies and reduction of downtime, could you put a number on the cost you saved, or the efficiency you’ve increased because of Digital strategies you’ve adopted?
On some projects we can put a number, but not on all. We don’t calculate numbers based on entire set of projects, we do it for a single project. Before we start a project, we define which metrices will be measured after what period to ascertain the realized benefits and to match them with expected benefits. The framework, that we have developed help us to find out how successful was the technology project. To give you examples, like I talked earlier, we could reduce the rejection rate for a certain mid product in one company by 75%, it is huge for any company. Then we have seen improvement in productivity by 20% with augmented reality training. In any organization, the new ask is to do more with less; you need to reduce resources and increase output and that happens only by deploying technology. So yes, numbers can be attached but not every time, like whenever you use technology to aid customer experience, it is very difficult to quantify improvement because there may be a host of factors that will impact it or a digital initiative covering organizational risk can be difficult to be quantified.
What are the challenges that you’ve faced when you’re rolling out these digital strategies? Did you face any resistance from your employees who are worried about becoming obsolete?
Fortunately, the leadership in the group is very encouraging, everybody wants digital transformation and they are well aware that if we have to excel, we have to go through this sooner than later. We face three major challenges, one is the skill that is required for any technology, your team needs to have people who can consolidate the technologies, who can design the enterprise architecture etc. Second is, especially in case of IoT, we have seen there are a very few vendors who provide end to end services. So in an IoT project what happens is, we will have one vendor who will give you IoT sensors, other will provide you with cloud platform to collect or data, yet another partner will do analytics on it and an AI partner will say let me make sense out of it and provide actionable insights and so on. For this then you will have to have an effective & technologically aware program manager who can manage all of these. Third challenge is of prioritization, every company is working on some projects or initiatives and not all of them are necessarily technology based. Business is always important and digital transformation is also for business only. Every organization have limited bandwidth and it becomes challenging to prioritize which initiatives comes first and which comes later. Though, we use some scientific frameworks also to prioritize but still it takes good amount of time to decide on what to work on first because there is so much to do in this space.
What factors would you say are the reason for the success of your projects?
The most critical thing is, as I have said before, the longer any organization or an individual takes to digitally transform themselves, the harder it becomes to excel or even survive in the industry. We know and understand this, so whether it is driven by the customers or internal, digital transformation is necessary and inevitable. So, the core theme behind this is that we cannot wait for other companies to come disrupt us, we must disrupt ourselves, we need to challenge the orthodoxies within us and come out with newer business models, innovative and more effective ways to handle processes and our partners – be it a supplier or a customer. The urge & commitment to remain ahead of others in digital front is the main reason of our success till now.
Another reason for our success is our unique start-up program called STRIDE. As part of this program, CXOS from each group company meet identified start-ups on one day each quarter to identify which start-ups are relevant for us to partner and then we start engaging with them on innovative digital initiatives. This is a win-win program for the participating start-ups as well as our companies.
Are you using Blockchain or BI technology? What is your social media strategy?
I will talk about BI first, it is a foundational project for us, we have BI tools, that give us reports, in most of the companies. We started with descriptive analytics, using BI tools and then we moved to diagnostic analytics and then targeting predictive analytics followed by prescriptive analytics. There are areas where we have already started using predictive analytics, but the way we really measure our success in analytics, is measuring outcomes of our decisions taken based on data. So, analytics is one of our focus areas. Blockchain, we are still studying. The first step was to make everybody understand what blockchain is and how it is different from Bitcoin. Having done that, we have recently started working on a proof of concept for an identified process. We know that a network is a primary need for a blockchain to work effectively, so we are taking baby steps in this area.
About Social Media strategy, we have a few B2C companies, for whom social media is more important than others. We do have our social media handles and we have guidelines for the employees on how to behave in social media. Further, for our B2C companies we ensure that are no customer complaints that are there in social media that are not addressed. Our corporate communications team lead this area.
Do you think at you have an advantage because of Birlasoft, a company which is already doing a lot of innovations in recent technologies?
Ohh Yes. It is an advantage; they are a successful and leading technology company with a lot of thought leadership and that helps a lot. The synergy and collaboration within group companies have improved a lot in last 3 years and not only Birlasoft but all companies help each other because they bring their niche value adds to the table. We get to know each other’s experience and stories, what they are doing in their company and that inspires other companies. The digital collaboration portal that we are using to bring regular synergy is helping us a lot in taking benefits from other company’s experience.
Where do you think you stand amongst the competition with respect to Digital Transformation?
See, that is a tough question. To me I don’t think anything we do will be enough because it’s a dynamic world. If you take up a year-long project, by the time you are done with it, it is likely that the solution is already obsolete. But yes, if we talk about competition, if we do 100 projects in a year then though 90% projects will be foundational in nature but 9% are distinctive and 1% disruptive, which takes us ahead of the competition. Distinctive projects are based on thoughts which are new in the industry and none of the competitors have deployed those technologies or tried those methods in our industry whereas disruptive projects are based on completely disruptive ideas not tried by anyone globally. We have a budget for innovation and fail fast that helps to keep trying newer ideas. We will of course keep on using and going along with the technology that exists, automating our sales, improve productivity, engage customers in better ways etc., but that 10% is what will keep us ahead of the competition and ahead of the curve.
