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Insight :: Operations
Did liberalization help India's pharma industry?
India's signing up for the global TRIPS patent regime close on the heels of economic liberalization exposed the Indian pharma industry to withering global competition. How did the pharmaceutical industry cope with these changes and did they end up better or worse?
Professor Haritha Saranga from IIM Bangalore and Professor RD Banker from Fox School of Business, Philadelphia, set out to seek answers to these and other questions. Their research on the growth and productivity changes of Indian and multinational pharma firms presents some useful insights.
Viewpoint :: Operations
Quality profits
Quality improvement in a business requires both management attention and finite expenditure. Does the increased costs of achieving quality impair the ability to increase profits? Identifying the cause of bad quality and rectifying it at the source, is one way to improve both quality and profits. So how do you identify the source of bad quality?
Professor Vishnuprasad Nagadevara of IIMB and colleagues set out to solve this problem at a rail wheel factory. Using a classification tree method, they were able to isolate the source of bad quality and propose a solution.
Practice :: Operations
Satisfying customers - lessons from the public sector
Most businesses recognize the need for ensuring customer satisfaction. Yet, customer satisfaction is not easy to quantify or achieve. All of us as citizens consume services from the government and government-owned firms. And as consumers of these services, we are pretty clear whether we were satisfied or not. So are there lessons about customer satisfaction that businesses can draw from public sector firms? If so what are these?
Professor V. Naga devara and Anand Parkash of IIMB set out to answer these questions by studying customer satisfaction levels amongst clients of a public sector provider of construction and maintenance services. Read about their findings here.
Practice :: Operations
What determines customer expectations?
Transportation in India, and indeed for developing nations, is about connectivity. There are towns and villages in far-flung places that are isolated and not linked. Customers should then be concerned about the basic needs -availability and accessibility - and not so much about experience. But is this really true? Do customers expectations in developing nations go beyond the basic needs? If so, what are those? Do regional differences impact expectations from the service provider?
The Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC) is one of the largest transportation corporations in India. Andhra Pradesh has 3 distinct regions – coastal Andhra, Rayala Seema and Telengana. Professor V. Nagadevara and Professor TV Ramanayya of IIM Bangalore studied the expectations and satisfaction levels of customers of the APSRTC, to comprehend the levels of customer expectations and if regional differences influence these expectations and experiences.
Practice :: Operations
Evaluating the performance of Purchasing & Supply Management
The cliche "anything that counts, gets counted" seems to have given the Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) function at companies, a miss. Purchasing spend at many companies, could be as high as 40% to 70% of their total sales volume . Yet, an objective and meaningful evaluation of the PSM function's performance remains surprisingly elusive.
Senior managers are unanimous in proclaiming the criticality of the PSM function. But how do they measure its value? How do they assess the impact of its performance on the company's financial per PSM personnel? Professor Haritha Saranga and Professor Roger Moser of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore have studied the challenges in evaluating the PSM function and propose a method for such evaluation.