The world’s largest and most renowned joint-venture towerco, Indus Towers has been hard at work efficiently providing passive infrastructure on a non-discriminatory basis to Indian telecom operators and wireless broadband service providers since its founding in 2007. The company has consistently achieved high rankings among other industry leaders in India for the efficiency of its operations. We spoke with Deepak Sharma, VP Supply Chain to learn some of the methodology driving these achievements. With over 23 years of experience managing end to end supply chain & logistics including sourcing and operations for companies including GE, Schneider and Aditya Birla Group, Deepak now handles services sourcing, business partner relationship management, demand and supply planning, warehouse & logistics, SCM process design and pan India SCM operations at Indus Towers.
TowerXchange: Since you joined Indus Towers in 2012 the company has achieved some of the highest standards for efficiency in the industry; can you share some detail on how you achieved this?
Deepak Sharma, Vice President Supply Chain, Indus Towers:
Shortly into my new role at Indus Towers, management conveyed to me that I had to take my team through a complete transformation to keep pace with the breakneck speed with which India’s telecom industry has been moving. Thanks to the support and guidance of the Management Committee of Indus Towers, we have carried out all that we set out to do.
In early-2013, we embarked on a three-year transformation journey with the team. We met at an offsite location in Goa to chalk out the vision, the mission, and the journey roadmap. The goal was to achieve global-best KPI benchmarks, and to meet all internal and external stakeholder needs and expectations by providing effective, flexible, proactive, cost-effective and extended supply-chain and logistics models through technology, innovations, value-added services and collaborative efforts, all within a period of three years.
Team SCM coined the slogan “One Team One Dream” for the first year, 2012-13, “Go Beyond” for 2014-15 and “Go Global” for 2015-16. A slogan is a great communication and accountability tool which reminds you of your target and the heights to be achieved.
As part of its roadmap, the SCM team designed a programme that it termed as 5P – People, Partner, Process, Price, and Performance. The team decided that thereafter, everyone would only use the term ‘Partner’ for all vendors and suppliers in all the communications.
We strongly believe in ‘People First’ and hence we prioritised People over Performance, as great performance can be achieved only when people are happy. Satisfied people will be encouraged to improve partner satisfaction and together they will work to deliver customer satisfaction.
The team decided on the following as parameters of success. For ‘People:’ in two years the company would work on the issues of the SCM departments’ employee satisfaction survey (ESAT) results and ensure that it is the highest in the telecom industry. For ‘Partner:’ the partner (vendor) satisfaction results should be the highest in the telecom industry. For ‘Price:’ substantial capex savings, implementation of innovative sourcing processes. For ‘Process’ the team would generate value through Process Excellence and undertake an overall warehousing and logistics transformation. And for ‘Performance’, they would win global awards for the company.
As part of Mission People, the team set for itself the target of becoming the number one in the industry by achieving the following bold targets of:
- Employee Satisfaction Survey (Achieving >4.5 out of 5)
- Partner Satisfaction Survey (Achieving 100th percentile in telecom)
- Improve the Function’s KRA to L5 (Outstanding) level, and
- Contribute to Customer Satisfaction Survey (Achieving 100th percentile in telecom)
To enhance people’s performance a 4D-virtuous cycle was initiated with the following goals.
- Set a Direction
- Skill Development (including professional, interpersonal and excellence training through collaboration)
- Performance-based Delivery
- Distinguish
Direction: Together we crafted a Vision for themselves as ‘Excellence thru’ Collaboration’. The entire SCM Value stream was studied, and necessary improvement projects were undertaken to set the right direction of movement. The team also digitally documented the complete work process, guidelines, and job description; and urged everyone to study and follow the steps as recorded in the document.
Development: We facilitated many in-house and external training programs along with the Process Excellence team. Another initiative called ‘Coffee with Boss’ was launched which gave an opportunity to all the managers to meet one-to-one with their subordinates and discuss everything which the subordinate wanted to share, whether personal or professional. The aim was to meet each subordinate every quarter and ensure that every single concern raised by the subordinate was addressed within that quarter.
Another major objective of the programme was to create a gender-balanced team. The ratio of women in the SCM team was very low to begin with, so concerted effort was made to hire more women into the department.
A Women’s Forum was also formed for women employees across the county where they could connect over video conference and discuss the challenges faced by them at work. The Circle SCM Heads took the responsibility of addressing these challenges. All such initiatives led to creating a productive and happy workforce across the ranks.
Delivery: We started conducting monthly and quarterly reviews and started giving constructive feedback. Team was tracked against clearly defined parameters and KPIs.
Distinguish: Drawing from my past experience where I had organised cultural shows to connect the workforce, I along with my team initiated a pan-India SCM Meet in April 2014, where rewards and recognitions were introduced for all subsequent years.
Now all the supply-chain team members get together once in a year to celebrate their success. They organise shows like stage plays, fashion shows, and dance performances that bring out the fun and creative side of all the team members.
For one particular mega event, the team invited members of the top management – they were amazed to see all the company’s employees participating with much aplomb in all such fun-filled and creative events such as fashion shows and stage plays. The spirit of the team was infectious. The idea behind such initiatives is that when people are happy, they will focus on their jobs and will keep the partners and customers happy. We saw a complete turnaround in their approach to customer service – and they took care that there were no integrity issues.
With all these initiatives as part of ‘Mission People’, the team has been able to achieve an SCM Employees E SAT Survey Score of 4.54 which is the highest ever in the history of the organisation for SCM.
TowerXchange: You emphasise the importance of working with vendors as partners; can you explain some of the benefits of this approach?
Deepak Sharma, Vice President Supply Chain, Indus Towers:
A healthy partnership is key to the success of not just a project, but of the entire business. The partner relationship needs to go beyond being just transactional to become a long-term relationship. The partner relationship also has to include making their resources available to you to expedite a critical path project effort or to help test out a strategic concept.
Becoming a trusted partner means that one of the best calls of the week from an organisation is unexpected and begins with the words, “Do you have a minute? I’d like to bounce something off you and get your reaction.” It’s when an organisation invites the partner to the office or dinner and wants to get their reaction to a new growth strategy.
At Indus Towers our major work is outsourced and dealing with over one hundred major infrastructure equipment partners and more than five hundred and fifty managed services partners. Our KPIs are delivered through all of these critical partners.
Our customers evaluate our services on the following key parameters: the quality of implementation (FTR, first time right), the build time of sites, and the network uptime. In 2012 – 13 when these key parameters were evaluated, we found the scenario to be gloomy and unexciting. Not living up-to the customer’s expectations lead to low customer satisfaction.
To overcome the challenges, brainstorming sessions and gap analysis were conducted in a CFT (including Partners). Here we kept the Low Customer Satisfaction (C-SAT) score against the Partner Satisfaction (P-SAT) Survey Report. We realised that for the last 3 years the P-SAT score had been almost stagnant.
Further study of the ‘voice of the partner’ highlighted following set of concerns: there was no platform for dispute resolution, KPI sign offs were delayed, payments were late, POs were delayed, and issue resolution was slow.
The voice of the partner was studied and compared with the voice of the business which clearly identified the missing communication between the partners and Indus.
As the outcome it was decided to devise an ‘Effective Contract Management Programme’ to ensure effective contract delivery and to monitor its effectiveness through a scorecard to increase partner satisfaction and improve our KPIs.
An elaborate platform was formulated and implemented a ‘Four Tier Contract Governance’ across India.
Contract Governance was rolled out to the majority of the partner categories, and for each category of partner detailed key focus areas were identified. Partner issues were clearly identified and prioritised based on the risk exposure. Necessary course corrections and procedural changes were implemented to sustain the benefits of the actions taken and avoid repetition.
Over three years a total of 4,000 meetings were conducted with over 10,000 concerns raised and resolved; partners were happy as their concerns were being noted and monitored for resolution.
These meetings have helped to identify major and long pending areas of improvement which were directly linked to organisation performance. Some of the concerns having a major impact include:
On-time payment to partner
- Concern: Delayed payment to a partner was leading to dissatisfaction in that partner due to difficulties in the management of working capital and constraints on business expansion.
- Our action: A focus group was formed to achieve on-time payment. Today’s we are paying our partners on-time on ~95% of occasions, a considerable improvement over 53% in 2012. To ensure its sustainability we pay interest on delayed payments.
PO delays
- Concern: Delay in providing the PO to partners even after work completion which clearly impacts their payments and work reconciliation.
- Our action: Clear guidelines to partner and team were circulated not to work without a PO. Complete value stream analysis of the P2P (Procure to Pay) cycle was put in place, formulated to ensure the availability of the PO on time.
Delayed KPI sign off
- Concern: Huge gap and delay in KPI sign off leading to partner payment deduction and delay in the payment. The major reason identified for the delay was lack of clarity on the field and asset tracking.
- Our action: System automation implemented through i-Map and WMS and improved TOC which clearly provided the field data leading to a reduction of KPI sign off pendency.
Through the Contract Governance Platform we eliminated transformed vendors into partners. This not only lead to a turnaround in partner satisfaction but also defined deliverables to map performance.
Significant improvement in Indus Towers’ KPI’s helped us to achieve a historic Customer Satisfaction score of 91%
For P-SAT Indus Towers is at the 100th percentile in the Indian telecom industry ( IMRB Surveyed ) and the 100th percentile in the B2B Segment in India (IMRB Surveyed).
Our transformed partners have not only made us best in the telecom industry but among the best companies in B2B industry; I appreciate them and thank them on behalf of Team SCM!
TowerXchange: You encourage high levels of teamwork in your company; what are some of the ways you support this?
Deepak Sharma, Vice President Supply Chain, Indus Towers:
I am deeply connected to Indus values and believe that these values have helped us realise all the goals that we had set for ourselves. We have a catchy acronym, ‘EXCITE’, for the company’s value system. These values are:
Excellence - Ensure best-in-class processes and a continuous improvement culture that provide scalability and the highest quality at an optimum cost.
Customer - Be the preferred partner to our customers with the highest levels of responsiveness and agreed services, consistently.
Integrity - Maintain and promote the highest standards of professional conduct by being fair, honest and transparent in all actions and decisions.
Teamwork - Think and work together beyond self, functional boundaries, hierarchies, businesses and geographies. Actively encourage mutual respect, sharing and collaboration.
Environment - Be responsible and sensitive toward the environment – and the communities –where we work. Uphold the highest standards of health and safety at all times.
I strongly believe in teamwork, and the achievements of Team SCM would not have been possible without it.
We are spread across fifteen circles covering fifteen states of India which brings huge diversification from state to state and culture to culture. Other than the corporate office which consists of around 27 team members, every circle team consists of six team members. This team is headed by CSCMO of Indus Towers.
In year 2012-13, there was a lack of interconnectivity between the team members, leading to work being done in the isolation. Other demotivating factors included low performance, no rewards or recognition, and a lack of consideration for team SCM’s constraints within the organisation.
These were indications of a lack of teamwork; we also realised that while all other functions used to meet to communicate with their team members and set the work in the right direction, it was unheard of in Team SCM. There was a clear need to set the right direction for the team and communicate the expectations clearly with them.
It was in the year 2012 that the SCM heads of all the circles met together for the first time. All of us decided to set directions for the team and plan the strategy to work together. The India SCM Head meet was planned where inputs were given by all the team to formulate the strategy by setting the vision for Team SCM
Considering the four major stakeholders of SCM function (employees, internal customers, external suppliers and internal suppliers), the team came up with ’Excellence through Collaboration’ as the team’s vision. In addition, we set three annual slogans to communicate to the teams.
We completed the value stream mapping of our function and identified several areas of improvement. Multiple initiatives and projects were rolled out to improve the efficiency of the teams working on:
- Relevant and innovative product development
- New material requirement forecast process rollout
- Purchase requisition automation
- Material requirement planning process roll out
- Warehousing process manual
- Site return process locking in the ERP
- Scrap disposal process
Furthermore, other programmes were initiated and implemented for people development and team building in which I was directly involved to ensure the team was connected together:
Forum For Female (F3)
- Induct Female team members to have gender balance
- Providing an open, safe, healthy and growth-driven atmosphere
- Launched Forum For Female where people can listen every Quarter
Coffee with Boss
- One to one structured but informal discussion with reporting heads
- Resolution of professional hurdles at the office and if possible personal
- Giving and getting constructive feedback on a quarterly basis
- Indicating training requirements
Individual and Team Development
- Quarterly individual performance / KRA review
- Monthly Circle SCM Heads review
- Weekly team reviews and knowledge sharing sessions
Support and Training
- Identification of individual training needs and arranging with the help of HR. Job skill and soft skill related training programmes
- Development of refresher and handy training modules
Collaborate and Celebrate Success as One Team
- Team and family get-togethers. Team building exercises
- Bouquet and chocolates to each employee spouse on individual and team success. Birthday and wedding anniversary wishes to family members
We started organising the pan-India SCM Meet which was never conducted in the organisation where we focus on team building and the review of our initiatives and our mission.
Today we proudly say that we are part of Team SCM and happy to work together, win together and celebrate together.
TowerXchange: Can you share any specific success stories to share some detail on the process?
Deepak Sharma, Vice President Supply Chain, Indus Towers:
In 2012-13 we had 55 warehouses where major concerns were identified in operations including non standard processes, compliance issues, multiple service providers, reverse logistics, inventory in-accuracy, security issues, conflicting ownership, redundant transporters, resource capability issues, and poor environmental standards.
To transform these warehouses we initiated a new mission and commitment specifically focussed on warehouse operations called “World Class Warehousing and Logistics”. We committed to creating safe, automated, process driven, productive, cost effective and green warehouses with the highest levels of standardisation and innovation to serve our customers with best in class experience. It was agreed that the key features would include full automation, a best-in-class distribution network to provide on time delivery in forward and reverse logistics, optimal inventory management, accessibility and security of stock, and value added services for our clients.
To initiate transformation we gave the project the success mantra of:
We implemented our 5P approach for warehouse transformation keeping EHS (Environment, Safety and Health) first. We identified missing processes and other requirements for mapping business and quality.
Results
Our seven warehouses were certified, licensed, and awarded the industry’s first and highest warehouse certification, by CII for WAREX – The Warehouse Excellence Certification. Indus Towers is a part of the first highest number platinum certification in a first attempt in India. This certification exemplifies our value of excellence. It is an honour for us to be recognised as above, not only as the first in the telecom industry, but also a first amongst all industrial sectors!
As part of our transformation journey, we had applied for seven warehouses which were audited by the CII Team. Out of seven warehouses audited by CII, four have achieved platinum and three gold.
The certification proves our robust, core warehousing functions, facility and processes. We competed with industry leaders, including TAFE, Lucas TVS, Aditya Birla and Tata Steel amongst many others. Other companies that have applied for WAREX and are under assessment are Maruti Suzuki – Spare Part Division at Bangalore and Mahindra Logistics.
Also our Warehouses are awarded as Green warehouse of the Year in ELSC Leadership award.
I would like to give a special thanks to the following people who helped make these achievments possible: Mr Shantha Raju- Ex CEO; Mr Bimal Dayal – CEO; Mr Mandeep Sachdeva- CSCMO ; Mr Vivek Kumar – CHRO; All CCEOs, RDs, Functional Heads and each member of Team SCM.
TowerXchange: How are you and your team keeping up with the pace for telecoms development set by the Indian government?
Deepak Sharma, Vice President Supply Chain, Indus Towers:
As India’s leading telecom infrastructure company, it is our responsibility to service the community we work in with utmost perseverance. We believe that a robust telecommunications infrastructure is a precursor to a country’s sustained socioeconomic growth, with benefits permeating across sectors, citizens and geographies. Therefore, our efforts are always backed by directions set by the Indian government, be it allocation of spectrum resources for residential and enterprise intra-telecommunication requirements or recommendations on improving telecom services in underdeveloped or developing regions.
TowerXchange: The tower industry has changed a lot over the past few years; what are some of the next changes that you anticipate?
Deepak Sharma, Vice President Supply Chain, Indus Towers:
There has been a conspicuous growth and enhancement of the telecom infrastructure in the recent past. For instance, there has been a change in profile of consumers characterised by a large young population and rising middle class with increasing spending capability and higher adaptability to technology.
Additionally, in a recent, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) forum, there were discussions around building a case for four new spectrum bands as part of its 2025 vision. With the recent push by government of India for renewable energy, more specifically solar power, the ecosystem is likely to get a stronger impetus. The telecom industry is looking at solar power becoming more viable as a result and there is likely to be more adoption of such sources by the industry.
