In the post Marx world the type of addiction and their turf of controls are unlimited. Gone are those days the intellectual , the common, the educated , the emancipated or the endangered and the enamored all were under the booze of the most prevailing drug (more than Marijuana ) in the world and i.e. Marxism. Now anything and everything just take control of your grey cells, make you think the way it designed its content, make you speak the way it writes its script or sing the tune it created and composed of its own. It may be the smart phone , it may be the hot money , it may be the rare bred racing horse , it may be the deep attachment to collection of antique, connection with celebrities . It may be the weed , work or the word jugglery . The addiction is no longer a bad word neither creates any inhibition to be accepted in greater stretch of modern society . But overwhelming the all pervasive addiction across the community , country and so corporates is the addiction to chaos . An unadulterated , pure and pristine chaos. Defined , distinctly identified the chaos just runs its magic once it take its stakeholders in its ambit. The greater world has always its part of chaos in very functional condition , but never contemplated seriously . The corporate ,the company the community or country every entity in fact comes sometimes in near or future under its(the drug called chaos) long protracted spell. Specially more in eastern side than its western counter part where organization , management or science could easily connect the bigger mass . But the developing world , the emerging world or the recently upcoming world eagerly to be clubbed inside the elite group developed ones are anyway never falling short of chaos. Somewhere the chaos is by product of functional anarchy , somewhere it is just the direct result of deeply flawed system intelligently and intentionally developed with so many grey areas over the years with unscrupulous stakeholders. Chaos with its complementary components of crisis just work to the interest of a very small part of any entity(whether its company, corporate or community) while forcing the most of the other part to work at suboptimal level. And the most irony is that being inside the chaos for so long , the residents inside simply got used to it , start enjoying it and then entrench it further in their system with a very strange type of skills developed to thrive on it. While being exploited at day in , day out the whole population just forget its true worth yielding to an illusion of exploiting it to their interest instead of being exploited themselves by the wrong system.
A company like ours also was not an exception to the above anyway. With its genesis deeply rooted to a transition from a litany of ownership companies very much characterized by out and out private , professional and profiteering motif to a nationalized coal behemoth where all those feudal and autocratic psyche been inherited sans the ownership the same entities always cherished in their heart in those pre-nationalized era. The power got shifted (from owners to the their managers) not the sense of belongingness. The pay roll got changed from ownership company to the public sector of semi Govt company without any major change of governance pattern. Yesterday’s employee cum manager became today’s project officer cum owner which simply created a huge churn in the psyche of the organization. The complete control over the assets created over the century whether the mine , mechanism or machine all just were not only pampering but also unprecedented wind fall in the hand of those transition force who were subordinate to ownership (which were disciplined and organized by default to skim the optimal gain from their assets).a just a few years ago. Added to it the exponentially increasing demand for power and so the fossil fuel along with consecutive five years plan to build a new India (specially reemphasizing the energy sufficiency after the great oil shock) suddenly take over the competitiveness , efficiency or efficacy of our work force. The almost fully protected market with price leverage in its disposal , a sedentary monopoly circumvent its imagination or innovation , confine its mobility and create a situation where every thing could be taken as granted. And till the economic liberalization got kicked off in early nineties , the productivity as well as production both were just company set target rather than demand driven vision. Undercutting the production target and overpricing the product was just complementary twin to give rise to an obese , outmoded organization overtly indulgent in everything a monopoly detests , competition, efficiency, innovation. While we were feeding on our own complacency , and the energy value chain were trying to find its way out of the confinement of overdependency on us. Thanks to our overindulgent ministry we just got sometimes fell short of production but never of profit. With liberalization came up the call of captive route , decentralization of coal blocks, a restricted and regulated path of opening up the sector too half hearted in prosecution and half baked in policy formation, the real challenge never took off. The organization just kept growing in isolation inspired by huge push for production but never any pull for productivity. The corollary :we kept crossing the milestones of achievement, moved from one number to next higher numbers whether coal production , coal sales or profit booking , but all were in absolute number , not in those indices which could speak of our professionalism or sprouts our efficiencies . The perception simply never changed of the outer world , specially the whole energy value chain members(customers , consignees, and other stakeholders) although we got changed from one laurel to another . While we became from just PSU to Navartna and post market shoot out with block buster IPO, Mahartna with touching all time high market capitalization and reigning top players in the year 2013 , the financial benefits we could skim never gets reconciled with the economic benefit the nation aspired for. It was sometimes win-loose situation normally yield to a zero some gain , making profit at the cost of somebodies revenue loss , were never revered as a great company.
As mining company we grew much more laborious, chivalrous , expert , but managing the same we just never grew in real sense. It was always an absolute growth on production , never ever on productivity as thanks the overemphasis by GoI on numerator (how much tons produced) rather than denominator (how much cost incurred) to put a check on forex hemorrhage through the widening fissure of coal import just picking up its third position after gold and oil. And that also while India can easily boasts of third richest in world in coal reserve , to feed our turbines for next few hundred years. As the best cash cow with huge dividends , exchequers and off-loadable or buy back share value , contributing almost half a lakh crore annually we have just been let on our own sans some occasional rapprochements mainly on production quantity rather than cost incurred.
And just in such stage when we keep growing like hydra more on size less on suppleness , when we need badly to shed the extra fat or shred the extra flab, to keep our shape better rather than bigger to accommodate any forthcoming churn or change in the market (like shrinking fossil fuel bucket and swelling alternate energy stocks) we are hailed with the new messiah in our system and that is SAP.
Suddenly regime of departmentalization, domain domination or functional supremacy in isolation and individualization just got threatened and rule of integration along with process raj with an institutional logic rather than individual one just took to center stage. The data will no more be captive to so many bastions of interest who keeps on manipulating them to their convenience . Like quark in quantum theory data starts moving thick and fast before getting processed as an information. With its emancipation of dubiousness and captivity to plural and duplicity , data starts speaking the truth ,the single truth powering it as the most potent decision maker in the organization when processed and placed with others in different control table. The planning for processes , sequencing them and assigning its each components with its resources (whether man ,material, machines or marketing) along the cost incurred and time engaged , the system never been so smarter , so sophisticated to capture every detail of the operational efficiency , the variance between what we aspired for and what we achieved. Benchmarking against standard cost parameters suddenly we will start discovering our lethargy and laggardness in the system where whole focusing on the denominator in the indices the cost which was long overdue. Realtime delivery of information with much more realistic figures will just keep us alerted 24X7 hours , 365 days , every moment across the nook and cranny of the organization. With a panoptic design, the organization will take the view of each and every process from , keep vigilante on its all operations not in isolation but in totality or holistic way to facilitate its decision making process from an integrated , informed rather than intuitive or instinctive approach.
Welcome the world of SAP , single source of truth nothing else.