The recently conducted recruitment drive by the Aditya Birla Group for its third Global Manufacturing Leadership Program, received an incredible response. Some of the best minds in the manufacturing industry signed up for this illustrious program in a bid to gain expertise on a global scale.

This landmark endeavour also sees manufacturing professionals embrace the best practices that the Group has undertaken in the last two decades. What started out as World Class Manufacturing (WCM) in 1995, based on the Japanese Quality model, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) blossomed into Corporate Business Excellence (CBE) in 2010.

According to Jagdish Ramaswamy, President, Corporate Business Excellence - Aditya Birla Group, "The aim was to become global and achieve a common language of excellence."

The shift was natural. WCM was restricted to the manufacturing units only, whereas CBE looked at giving a more holistic approach to the framework by including the services businesses as well.

The Corporate Business Excellence Cell incorporates best practices from renowned international business excellence/quality models such as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), the EFQM (formerly known as European Foundation for Quality Management) Excellence Model and the Deming Prize. It was the idea to go global, that pushed the Group to charter their own excellence framework.

"Deming was valid for Japan, MBQNA for US and EQFM for Europe. We extracted best practices from each of these and customised them to our needs and functions so that they could be easily adapted by our units and businesses," says Ramaswamy.

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