Chennai: It is work as usual at the Brakes India — the Deming Prize or not. The company''s foundry division became the first foundry in the world to win the Deming Award this year.

As a bonus the company''s foundry as well as the brakes divisions won the Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) Excellence First Category Award from the Japanese Institute of Plant Maintenance (JIPM) this year. Yet there is not much of a celebration. Perhaps due to the fact that winning quality awards year after year has become a habit for the TVS group.

The group has several firsts in this field. Sundram Fasteners is the first Indian company to get an ISO certification. The company has been winning the Supplier of the Year awards from the US auto giant General Motors and has won TPM awards from the JIPM.

Sundaram Clayton won the honour of being the first Deming company in India. In 2002 Sundaram Clayton''s brakes division got the Japan Quality Medal from the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (Juse). And this year, TVS Srichakra Tyres has won the TPM Excellence Award-First Category from JIPM.

The group can now boast of four Deming winners — Sundaram Clayton (brakes division), Sundaram Brake Linings, TVS Motor Company and Brakes India (foundry division). It is certainly the Indian Deming group.

The Brakes India foundry turns out about 42,000 tonnes per year for ductile iron and permanent mould castings and earns over Rs 200 crore with a growth rate of 15 per cent. Forty-eight per cent of the revenue is from exports to Europe, the US, Japan and South Africa.

Says V Narasimhan, executive director: "Our quality assurance manual was written out within two years of our starting operations, that is 22 years ago. We were the first foundry to align our quality systems to ISO 9002 standards, which was in 1992 and QS 9000 in 2001."

One of the early companies to get the ISO certification, Brakes India''s initial orientation was more towards documentation compliance. "The focus was only on customer drawings and specifications and not on the implied requirements. Further, there was no integration across various departments. The focus was on the quality of incoming products," says Narasimhan.

"Although we had established a reputation as a reliable supplier with accent on quality, our cost competitiveness was always under threat especially from the emerging economies," he adds.

But the change for better came about when the foundry became a member of the vendor cluster formed by Maruti Udyog with the help of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to learn total quality management (TQM) from the quality guru professor Y Tsuda from Juse. The car manufacturer got 11 of its vendors to adhere to quality systems and processes. The idea was to showcase couple of units so that others too can follow.

"The group of companies shared their knowledge by leveraging collective learning for greater individual benefits." According to him the division embraced TQM first with an idea of improving the performance to survive and prosper in a competitive environment.

"Our TQM journey started in 1998 and decided to challenge the Deming Prize only in 2002 when we decided to undergo TQM diagnosis by the Deming Prize committee. It was our guru Tsuda who encouraged us to go for the Deming."

Although TQM is synonymous with participation, involvement, accountability, ownership and empowerment, the division also formed a TQM council comprising senior management to facilitate in cascading the vision down the line and aligning all the activities towards realising the vision.

Till then "operating the business and not managing it in the real sense". Narasimhan and his team made a fundamental shift towards systematic analysis, pre-planning and blue printing of operations with focus on habitual improvements with the controls embedded within the system and the processes driven by the divisions own culture.

"Given the involvement, commitment and dedication of all the employees there were not any roadblocks nor any additional investments were made," he remarks. It should be mentioned here that never in its history has the foundry division lost a single manday due to labour unrest.

In 1999 the division also kicked off TPM under the TQM umbrella. This year the foundry division has won the TPM Excellence Award-First Category. "Ours is the first outfit to get the TQM and the TPM award in the same year," says a proud Narasimhan.

In the process the division also helped its suppliers to follow the quality path by disseminating and sharing its learning by conducting workshops. Vendors are encouraged to obtain ISO 9001 certification for their quality systems.

Soon, Brakes India foundry''s quality journey started contributing to the bottomline. Customer returns came down to one third. "Our concentration on new product development and application of computer-aided technology helped us to reduce lead times to almost 25 per cent of the original."

Are there areas that the division should focus more despite the awards? Narasimhan is open enough to say: "We have benchmarked ourselves against the best practices which reveals that we have to improve in the area of energy efficiency and output to input ratio whereas we are on par with the best with regard to external failures, product life cycle management, process control, productivity and surface utilisation."

According to him, the Deming Prize is only a license to practice TQM in the manner that they have chosen. "We still have a long way to reach the destination. Our future plans are to work towards becoming one of the best foundries in our class globally. Our intention is to achieve business excellence through technological leadership and thereby ensure total customer satisfaction."