The hints about the ancient belief of reincarnation that are scattered throughout Hindu mythology often seem to be insignificant to the casual reader. However, for someone who has been at the helm of an organizational paradigm shift, the concept of reincarnation seems very real and substantial.
Being a famous steel company, we work with a large number of vendors.With over 19 locations around the country, our company works with more than 30,000 vendors. The corporate playing field that our organization represents isakin to the battlefield of Maya that the Hindu scriptures refer to the material world as. Whenever a vendor wanted to collect his due payment from us, he would first have to reach one of our steel plants, submit an inquiry at the vendor desk of the plant and wait for the finance team to revert back with the update. Communication was solely based on word of mouth messages and there was no way in which a vendor could track the progress of his payments.
This process of payment collection can be parasitic for an organization, especially when there are 6 lac invoices to be processed each year and about INR 50 crores traveling between hands on a daily basis. In this case, without a proper system to track invoices, as well as a lack of unique tracking ID for vendors, the management of payments was extremely difficult. Our plants, where truckloads of raw material were a common sight, now became a hub for “truckloads” of angry and confused phone calls and emails.
In Hindu mythology, karma is the word that denotes the sum total of all the actions that a soul has performed during its time in the physical world. Depending on the actions that you do in this world, your next life will be determined, as a natural consequence for the decisions you make. Our karma in this case, was what one could call “bad karma”. For us, the future did not look so bright and any sort of organizational progress in its true sense seemed out of reach.
This is when we understood that we would need to look for a solution outside the boundaries of the ordinary. Instead of focusing on developing our on-field operations, we decided to transcend the material world and use the powers of the digital realm to solve our issues. By building a digital platform for our vendors, we were able to provide them a customized and extremely intuitive interface which could be used to check invoice status at each stage of the process.In an attempt to reduce the number of calls and inquiries that we were receiving, the digital portal was equipped with call recording and monitoring systems. The portal also allowed us to implement a ticketing tool that would help vendors maintain a track of their queries and the responses that they get. The digital platform also allowed us to strengthen our internal follow-up system, allowing us to include crucial stakeholders as liaisonswithin the process.
In the end, with a 22.9% decrease in monthly vendor queries, we had just escaped the unending cycle of death and rebirth that most companies experience, consistently having to face the same issues due to a lack of innovative solutions.
Lessons Learned
• For true organizational progress, innovation and out-of-the-box thinking are must
• Always aim to transcend existing conditions and circumstances
• Focus on pain-points that impact customers – they are often the most important aspects to consider
• Internal and external issues are often intertwined – find an answer that can solve both at once