The Hindu Business Line : Wipro grows in quality consulting

Leveraging the lessons from its internal quality initiatives, the company has developed a copyrighted Six Sigma for software methodologies and plans to increasingly deploy Six Sigma projects in customer engagements.

Bangalore , May 23

QUALITY is getting Wipro money. Literally. Internal quality initiatives at Wipro have now translated into a quality consulting practice with over 150 `customer touch' Six Sigma projects under way. Over double that number are expected in the future and also consultancy in other quality models such as PCMM and CMMi.

Mr Anurag Behar, Vice-President, Mission Quality, told Business Line that internal quality measurements had set the benchmark for other companies and the company took a conscious decision to migrate the benefits to customers' projects and processes.

Leveraging the lessons from its internal quality initiatives, the company has developed a copyrighted Six Sigma for software methodologies.

It plans to increasingly deploy Six Sigma projects in customer engagement so that we can offer time, cost and quality benefits to customers,'' Mr Behar said.

In earlier years, Wipro had highlighted the actual cost savings from internal deployment of quality practices, including Six Sigma methodologies.

Of late, the emphasis on internal cost savings had shifted to business benefits that can be passed on to the customer, Mr Behar said.

Wipro has over 700 Six Sigma projects involving 3,500 people under way and plans to have about 40 per cent of future quality projects during the year directly involving customers' businesses, processes and projects.

Wipro's customers gained significantly from these efforts during the past year, said Mr Behar.

For instance, a time and materials-based project had its testing time reduced by 60 per cent using `Taguchi' methods.

An over 50-90 per cent cycle time reduction over 35 projects involving customers enabled time and cost savings and faster time-to-revenue, Mr Behar said.

In its latest annual report, Wipro states that by applying Six Sigma methodologies in a project for a retailer, the company reduced the test case execution time and brought down the number of test cases from 848 to 167.

The 100 per cent functionality coverage translated the reduction rate to around 80 per cent of test cases, giving benefits to the Wipro team and the to the customer in terms of reduced execution time and test result analysis time.

"We are offering quality consulting in the BFSI and manufacturing sectors in the US and additionally to captive BPO centres in India," said Mr Behar.

He added that such engagements not only let Wipro offer immediate business benefits to customers but enabled customer retention and increased scope for future engagements.