The Hindu Business Line : Foxed? Apply innovation!

Productivity, quality and now innovation. That is how priorities have changed for Indian industry, specifically IT/ITES. Recent studies by CII and Nasscom-McKinsey say that 70 per cent of executives surveyed will increase spending on innovation in 2006.

To most of us, innovation is another abstract word, such as creativity. How then is innovation defined as a business concept?

"It is finding simple solutions within an existing framework of business to improve workflow," says Shree Phadnis, Principal Consultant and Head of Innovation Practice, QAI.

QAI India provides Software Process Improvement Consulting and has trained over 70,000 professionals to implement innovation in their workflow.

Some familiar examples of managerial innovation are Brainstorming and Thinking Hat approaches. Phadnis shares some instances of how innovation leads to lesser time and cost to finish a process.

Instances of innovation

The recent data theft from an HSBC call centre leads to organisations scrutinising the credentials of people they hire. These multi-stage interviews only slow down the recruitment process. "This is pointless. One doesn't need a history of crime to be a criminal. Crime is spurred by the access to data while one is at work. That is the real problem," says Phadnis.

He suggests a solution using `Aliases'. Let all data be coded so that the person working on them doesn't know the details of the transaction or the client's identity. The front end of the interface is an Alias and the back end is the real data. As no one knows the real data, security is ensured.

Most problems have solutions staring us in the face, we only need to look carefully, he says, for instance, banking transactions that typically have 1.5 page-long inputs (feeds coming from elsewhere such as balance sheets and statements).

As this size of input doesn't fit the regular PC screen, users scroll up and down for reading and copying data, leading to errors and loss of time to complete work. "We hit upon a zero-cost solution. Every computer screen our client had was a 17" rotatable one (with width longer than height). So we rotated the feed input by 90 degrees to fit the screen. The screens were also rotated by 90 degrees for reading the rotated data," he says.

The next case study took a top-notch government funded engineering school a year to find a solution. "We took a day and there was no extra cost involved," he claims.

Reaping expert advice

A manufacturing organisation faced the problem of tractors sinking into the ground while harvesting paddy. The government institution suggested redesigning the tractor wheels on the lines of a battle tank's. This would help distribute the weight of the tractor evenly and prevent sinking.

But QAI defined the problem differently. The company looked at why the tractor was heavy. At every stage, cut paddy was loaded on to the tractor (in the hopper), thus increasing its weight. The company was asked to periodically deposit the cut crop in a different hopper.

When this proved cumbersome, the problem was redefined - to isolate the tyres and the ground to prevent direct contact. Tractors cut stems of paddy and discard them in the direction opposite to the tractor motion. "We realigned this control motor so that paddy stems were now thrown in front of the tractor - thus isolating the ground from the tyre," says Phadnis.

Innovation can also be applied to well-structured processes such as data collection and programming.

Record Management for ITES firms involves going onsite, bar coding records, sorting them and then 7-8 days of data entry. Innovation helped do all these processes in a day.

QAI provided personal laptops to its employees on a zero-interest loan. Data was entered onsite into the laptops and automatically transferred to the database. Physical controls were built and access through secure IDs prevented data from being transferred to personal drives.

Every month an allowance was given for using the laptop for office work. This amount was deducted against the loan amount until the loan was paid off. The employee eventually owned the laptop and looked at it as an incentive. "As a company we did not invest in any asset and yet got work done", says Phadnis.

Innovation can benefit more than one process. But corporates are hesitating to look beyond conventional solutions to problems.

"One of the major problems with innovation is that there is a new problem to tackle at every stage. Companies have to be willing to go the full way, else one cannot see results," he says.

Businesses have evolved to such an extent that one is used to thinking sector-specifically. But innovation is not sector-bound. Organisations look at innovation at managerial and decision-making levels. R&D centres are being renamed Innovation Centres. The mantra today is "Think small, innovate in a big way."

archana@thehindu.co.in

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