The Hindu Business Line : Why reinvent? There's knowledge to share

STORY so far: It is easy to get lost in the happenings around ignoring burning issues closer home. So I busy myself with work on hand, which includes even simple things such as attending to e-mail. Company bankers come on a routine inspection and they have pitiful stories of how some borrowers bleed the bank white.

Episode 31

Teamwork has so many advantages that it pains to see why people reinvent the wheel rather than collaborating with another who has already found the solution. In companies and offices, people who have problems may be talking to the wrong people for solutions while those who have knowledge may not be talking at all. While some amount of such silence could be attributed to being humble, when organisations lose profits, it is wasteful to have dormant knowledge.

"What you are saying, Swati," said the boss, after listening to my nearly-10-minute monologue, "is that we need knowledge management. I have been talking to a software developer about this during my golfing sessions."

"If you okay," I said, "we can start working on a project to harvest the knowledge."

"I would suggest," he said, "you spend the next week or so to study about KM. If necessary, pay a visit or two to some of the KM players around. I will be away for a day to participate in a meeting organised by the Ministry of Information Technology."

"On what?" I asked.

"After MIT — not Madras, but Massachusetts, Institute of Technology — pulled out of the Media Lab collaboration, blaming a clash in styles with Shourie, there is a renewed interest in the Lab's work. Our company is both a sponsor and an active participant in research, and so our interest in the continuance of the Lab is high. The meeting is between the minister and the corporate sponsors, plus the IITs."

"But the minister was unhappy," I recounted from what I had read in the media, "that there was no contribution from MIT in the research that was going on in India."

"This is the problem," boss said. "And if you ask them, they say they believed in bottom-up approach. They wanted to bridge disciplines such as physics, chemistry, optics and music. It has 40 registered patents to its credit, and its contributions include advances in electronic paper, new forms of data hiding, wearable computers, musical jackets and quantum computing."

"MIT's Media Lab is not a stranger to criticism," I said.

"That's right," he said. "Critics used to call it the `Red light area of MIT', partly perhaps because the Lab's faculty includes music composers, film makers, psychologists, physicists, graphic designers, performers, mathematicians, computer scientists, biologists, and architects and others."

When Media Lab Asia was founded in 2001, I remembered the hype that it generated. The foreign media put it this way: `To help develop technologies to benefit India's impoverished masses. The goal was to help transform one of the world's oldest cultures with affordable wireless and Internet technology that could offer everything from low-cost computers to online medical and matrimonial services'.

"It is not only a digital divide that we suffer from," boss continued. "There is a tremendous amount of ego divide."

*********

That afternoon, there was a presentation that Chandru was making in the conference hall for the ongoing meeting of branch heads and finance managers. As the chief of finance, he knew he would never be able to have a good night's sleep if his deputies down the line didn't churn out the right numbers and didn't chase the receivables all right.

Chandru had said during lunch: "Swati, if you have time to spare, pop in for the presentation. Not that you would not know what I am going to be talking about. At least you can correct me if I am wrong."

I had replied: "I'll make it."

*********

"I think our company can extend a longer credit," said one of the managers. "We will get more business."

"Nazir," said Chandru, "we are giving 25 days' credit while the industry average is only 15. And remember the cost of working capital. For every day of credit we give to our customers, we suffer interest for the money locked up in receivables. Also, the rate of sticky debtors varies directly in proportion to the length of credit."

"My problem is with inventory," another manager complained. "I feel we are stocking far more than what we need."

Chandru went to the board to draw some familiar-looking graphs and charts. I recollected what I had studied in costing — about stock-out situation, about EOQ and so on.

"Badri," said Chandru: "Was it in 1995 or 1996 when we lost an order from our European buyer? Because we didn't have one of the components in stock and replenishment would take three weeks. It was our competitor who bagged the order and we could win back that customer only last year, that too after sacrificing margins. All because of that stupid component which was not in the bin when we looked for it. It is ultimately a question of balance, if you see. Between cost of holding and opportunity loss."

I had a notebook to jot down some of the points which, as Chandru had said, were not new. Yet, when seeing theories translated to practice, there is always an element of newness.

Tony from the Kochi branch put up his hand and said:

"I have a suspicion of a major fraud happening in the bills that one of our contractors has been submitting."

All of a sudden, there was a heavy silence in the hall and even those who were half-dozing became very awake.

(To be continued)

swati_CA@hotmail.com

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