The science of management has never been so triumphant over the art of managing. Suddenly the Coal India in its 44 years of existence started getting the warmth of cohabitation and collaboration of hundreds of processes this industry has been dealing with or even exceling in just started feeling a huge level of solidarity and get togetherness an close knit relationship , an extended family with deep bond gluing all members together. The HR, The Marketing, the Production , the Planning , the Finance all the process members just started feeling a strong pull , an community connect between themselves . Some were well organized and got its patting on back , some lacked coherence or consistence some again just never congruent with the definition Champy & Hammer once espoused 25(incidentally the same year ERP name coined by Gartner to enable these process flow) years back. Those all and others who are till the other day were so indulgent to feel self centred , self aggrandizing and self glorifying are suddenly feeling urgency of communicating in-between , conniving together and , cocreating the best possible outcome . It is the emancipation of process from its claustrophobic self obsession of compartmentalization . It is long awaited release from its quarantined , cocooned , cloistered life inside the four walls of the departmental activities which just keeps growing along with the organization while never falling short of its share of narcissism nor ever ready to reconcile with other departments instead of the fact that all of them are supposed to tread with same mission , same vision , same goals set forth by the organization at its early years of foundation . Till date the infighting between any two departments were quite intense which sometimes snowballed to the level of face off. Till today the only way out in extreme of divergence or dithering on the issue across the departments is to put them under ages of one Sr management (at director level) who may pull them together by his or her post or power most of which sometimes yields nothing apart from reluctant obligation of warring departments . Till the other date the marketing deptt was never ready to buy in the production people’s logic of seasonality or slump in production due to sudden hazards or hurdles very much natural to mining under the earth arguably toughest profession in the world . The HR people always were in their automode to decide and derive any rule to be followed by just giving least heed to the account department ‘s capacity or constraints. The material department was simply obsessed with their custody of materials affording full indulgence in their own style of rationing and rationalizing the issue or indenture of materials without even caring to be in sync with production scheduling or machine maintenance. And yes with so much disintegrated thoughts or non communication , organization have been surviving like anything and testing some success although at sub optimal level. Thanks monopoly , this suboptimal level performance yielded no less return with huge price leverage. And this monopoly dividends just created another complacent , condescending environment which could easily defy and deny any logic of market design which believes in developing competence and competiveness. So being complete devoid of such rationality , the vicious loop created with these process owners or the process users just let them be allowed to be more disintegrated and disoriented anyway. A downward spiral appeared to become too tough to be stopped over the years of operating in such protected and so distorted market design.
Not any more. The suddenly reinvented processes seasoned (rightly or wrongly) over the years just bridged the gap amongst the departments , across the departments and inside the departments being the linchpin of communication and connection. A process concept is itself a fluid one which never allows any single activity to be left in the lurch. It symbolize the flow or conduit of activities sequencing them , synchronizing them , standardizing them ultimately setting them free from people centric or place centric performance where process once captured and contoured in right way will always deliver the same at any condition. Individual style or say of department has no place in its workflow which gets refined and refurbished depending on the customer’s or consumer’s (of the output of that process) demand. In other ways here the process descends on our company to bid adieu to all those islands of works or
So the jobs across the discipline or desks suddenly got huge momentum to get redefined , rechristened in the new taxonomy . The production planning , project monitoring , E-auction or recruitment just moves beyond its four walls of departments of origin and started touching upon the others’ fiefdom as well. As the system integrator started to take the stock of the process inventories and its existing design (the work flow, flow chart, schematic diagram ) the truths are being further revealed. There were more blurred areas than the bold ones , there were so many disconnect and so many inconsistence all of which made the whole process enough vulnerable to be exploited by human intervention .Simply enabling these activities with IT will not rout rather reinforce the incoherence or incongruence already spread their tentacles all over the years. So it was the time to capture the As-Is , means business as usual(read Process as usual or in existence flow and features) . To decipher any process in its constituent activities has never been less challenging and so less exciting. Challenging because every process must have its chained lines of the activities which are rarely present in our company and where there are so many missing links in between thus creating so many fissures and fertile ground for manipulation or meddling by any unscrupulous process stakeholders which unfortunately includes a section of our management also. Exciting because the first time ever the organization is now getting the scope to decipher it , dissect it, design it and if needed redesign it which is called Business process reengineering in the enterprise language. The variance , the expectation the gap analysis and the delta analysis before final blue printing all which come in the taxonomy of SAP implementation , suddenly started working as the oracle of business process catharsis of CIL. And whole litany of the force got intoxicated with fluidity of the processes.