Tag: Leadership

Inside PULSE: Developing Next-In-Line Leadership at Shahi
The textile and apparel industry is characterized by rapid changes in fashion trends, intricate supply chain dynamics, and fierce global competitiveness. Middle managers, positioned between top-level executives and frontline employees, play a crucial role in converting strategic objectives into practical plans. However, their duties frequently demand diverse skills beyond conventional managerial capabilities. Recognizing the need to cultivate and empower emerging leaders within its ranks, Shahi introduced PULSE– Promoting Upcoming Leadership at Shahi Exports.

“The program emerged to elevate leadership competence in organizational settings. The primary objective was to foster a democratic approach to mapping and executing work, emphasizing clear communication, team fortification, and the ability to inspire and motivate teams across our operations.”
Deepak Rautela, Associate Vice President, Organizational Development

The challenge: Designing an Effective Leadership Program

Challenge #1

The garment industry is highly competitive and demands time-bound delivery. Middle managers, whether on the shop floor or in a corporate set-up, face unprecedented challenges while ensuring timely planning and implementation of their key results. They are also the next in line to lead in their roles, making their development at their current level crucial to retention.

Challenge #2

Training is often perceived as a considerable investment away from work. Our Organizational Development team explored a range of formats. Initial approaches centered around one or two-day open programs, with brief interventions in the form of workshops or training sessions. These programs primarily served as awareness initiatives to address specific topics identified based on organizational needs and goals.

“The condensed format aimed at providing a snapshot of training within a day. However, identifying the limitations of this brief model, which often resulted in lower retention rates and lacked sustained impact, we transitioned to the PULSE program.”
Bhagyashree Rao, Trainer, Organizational Development

The Sweet Spot: Key Skills and Value for Time

PULSE is designed to focus on two key concepts: leading oneself and leading others.

The sessions, extending over 8-12 months, involve 3-4 hours weekly, comprising a transformative journey across various leadership aspects. The design prioritizes personal and interpersonal growth, focusing on two key concepts: leading oneself and leading others.

The modules target key competencies such as:
1. Preparedness to take up higher responsibilities and more prominent roles.
2. Authentic leadership and people management
3. Effectiveness in planning and operational alignment
4. Clear communication and line of sight
5. Decision-making and problem-solving
6. Higher performance, ownership, and proactivity
7. Building strong teams
8. Better relationships & collaboration at work
Infusing Feedback: What sets PULSE apart

PULSE goes beyond imparting skills, tools, and essential leadership habits. It integrates interactive methods such as motivational videos and real-life examples. The overarching goal is to instill the ability to create and sustain an authentic culture where organizational values seamlessly align with the vision, fostering a win-win situation for all involved.

Reflecting on the training experience, Manoj Mendiratta, GM, Marketing, Ladies Speacialty Division, said, “One of the highlights is redefining the meaning of ‘Feedback’ – shifting from a mere focus on ‘Points to Improve’ to understanding it as a combination of reinforcing positive aspects and identifying paths for improvement.”

The feedback and review process is structured, involving daily reviews focusing on individual improvement, behavior, and feedback mechanisms. Regular coaching and internal, periodic, and final reviews provide a comprehensive understanding of participants’ growth.

Impact

Enabling the participants to navigate challenges with resilience and determination, the pulse program empowers individuals and teams to take ownership of their actions. It cultivates effective habits, positive self-esteem, values, and emotional intelligence, all of which are pivotal in fostering success on both personal and professional fronts.

“One of my key takeaways from the program was ‘CARRY YOUR OWN WEATHER’, which has proven to be an incredibly powerful statement. It has allowed me to be self-reliant and maintain a positive attitude, regardless of external factors. By staying optimistic and focused on solutions, even during challenging times, I can inspire my team members to do the same and work together towards achieving our goals.”
Garima Sharma, GM – Marketing at LSD

Further, Shahi recognizes the significance of training and operational excellence, which is evident in the training of 455 leaders through PULSE. We successfully achieved 91% of our senior management training goal, delivering a total of 13,637 hours of training through the program.

This detailed approach extends with post-training interventions like individual development plans even after program completion. Certification serves as a reminder for trainees to sustain their acquired changes and learning. This underscores the objective of maximizing learning retention and sustaining development, guaranteeing a lasting impact on participants’ professional growth.

The Road Ahead

The vision for PULSE is to develop a foundational platform for succession planning, which will play a pivotal role in identifying high-potential leaders within the system.

Succession planning is a strategic imperative for forward-thinking industries and an essential process of identifying and developing organizational talent. This ensures smooth transitions in key leadership roles. PULSE graduates can seamlessly fill key roles when incumbents transition due to retirement, promotion, or unforeseen circumstances.

Jayati Kak, DMM, Marketing, LSD, finds inspiration from her PULSE journey and shares her vision,
“I certainly look forward to additional training programs that facilitate the professional development of both myself and my team, extending beyond conventional “On-the-job” technical learning experiences.”
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Jayati Kak, DMM, Marketing, LSD
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The long-term goals are to drive retention, uphold organizational values, and sustain a positive culture. PULSE is a critical element in this process, emphasizing that worker training initiatives may prove futile if leadership is not aligned to embrace new concepts. PULSE’s feedback component helps achieve that alignment, creating value in upgraded skills and concepts for the organization’s overall success and growth.

As industries navigate a dynamic and competitive landscape, succession planning emerges as a proactive measure, stimulating continuity, bolstering resilience, and attracting top talent to drive future success. By leveraging PULSE, we proactively prepare for leadership transitions, mitigating risks associated with talent gaps and ensuring smooth organizational progression.

“The program successfully meets the organization’s goals, contributing to overall achievement through effective training. I believe expanding the scope of our training program to include more managers at the mid-management level, such as assistant managers and factory floor managers, developing a mindset that aligns with site requirements and fosters growth.”
Sujeet, Operation Head, E10

Our target is to train 500 leaders under PULSE by 2025.

Through PULSE, Shahi is not just charting a growth path for its people but also grooming future leaders. In a world where leadership is a driving force behind success, PULSE stands as a beacon of inspiration, guiding upcoming leaders to transcend boundaries and lead with integrity, empathy, and effectiveness.
April 23, 2024
Shahi is accelerating digital operations in the apparel industry
Efforts at Shahi have taken a shift in the last year, and going digital has become the mantra. The focus is primarily on three objectives: improvement in growth, productivity, and experience. While growth and productivity are the focus of every organization globally, experience drives Shahi Exports. It means providing an excellent experience to our customers, employees, and other stakeholders. However, we cannot build this experience without a conscious effort to do it thoughtfully and sustainably.

As part of the strategy to develop this all-around quality experience, we have been engaging novel digital solutions. Using emerging technologies can help an organization unlock new opportunities, including ways to reduce our impacts on the environment.

A few of my favorite initiatives that we have been able to do this year is effectively converting physical activities to virtual ones in a short span of time due to reduced customer and employee travel in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. These have helped us save time and money and have reduced our carbon footprint due to significantly reduced fossil fuel usage. These initiatives range from virtual tours of our factories by customers using augmented reality-based solutions to leveraging blockchain-based fiber to retail traceability to ensure ethical sourcing practices.

Where the world is at

Globally, leaders aim to enhance organizational performance through digital technologies. These have become the core of every organization’s strategy these days. Boards have realized that leveraging the right technology to solve the correct problems can give them an edge over the competition. Labor-intensive companies have a big opportunity to transform themselves into tech-driven companies.

The wave of leveraging emerging technology, before the pandemic, gave the world some outstanding new companies in media, shared resource usage, gaming, education, and technology itself. These companies disrupted the existing business models making some even larger companies go out of business. The pandemic changed the context of all such disruptions. People who were shy to use digital technologies or even online meetings had to do it mandatorily now. Many of them cannot imagine going back to old ways.

We divided our digital initiatives into ‘foundational,’ ‘desirable,’ and ‘disruptive’ categories. While foundational and desirable types have precedents in the industry that we can emulate, it is the disruptive initiatives that we take the lead in to solve problems in a novel and more efficient manner.

Utilizing the RRP Mantra

Automation and intelligent solutions optimize manufacturing processes.

Anything that moves from table to table moves at a snail’s pace compared to anything that moves from system to system. To make automated decisions in augmented or virtual reality provides an experience as good as seeing the real thing and collaborating around it. Internet of things technology is also used extensively to calculate and improve productivity at shop floors and move the technology right to the network’s edge.

RRP is our mantra in process automation. First, we automated Repetitive, Rule-based, and Predictable processes and aimed to convert others into RRP processes by eliminating exceptions and process deviations. A simple example is the process of approvals. The first step will be a request, followed by a review, further discussion if needed, and then final approval. Digitalizing the process cuts down extensively on resources and time used to follow through each step.

Another example is the transfer and delivery of material. Tracking the movement of a package through a document that is manually checked at the gate of a facility exposes it to human error and forgery. We can mitigate this by adding a simple QR code to the document, making it unique, reducing human error, and ensuring that data about the movement of the package is stored on a network. This has been a practical exercise that has given us fantastic results in achieving much better productivity overall.

Exploring Ideas

Being disruptive requires a lot of experimentation and working with traditional partners. We have now started working extensively with disruptive start-ups and academia, as well as mining the massive pile of ideas that our employees generate as part of our innovation program. Our recent engagement with NASSCOM for their Manufacturing Innovation Challenge has helped us reach out to young innovators. We are now working on solutions and hope for great results.
Augmented mixed virtual reality to design a clothes in 3D fashion design software program creating virtual, true-to life garment visualization with cutting-edge simulation technologies for the fashion
Some of the experiments revolve around:

RFID-based productivity improvement.

Automatic guided vehicles,

Computer vision-based productivity improvement,

Automated measurement solutions,

Converting 2D images into 3D models with real-time collaboration,

AI-based identification of fabric composition,

Fabric inspection recording automation,

Natural Language Generation based training videos translation in vernacular languages,

RFID-based productivity improvement.
There are many more, and we are not afraid to experiment and fail, but we have seen that our success rate has outgrown our failure rate very fast and has enabled us to become a more innovative company.

Shahi has further improved its turnaround time through our interventions as an agile business. It has even helped our customers increase the accuracy of forecasts. Faster deliveries enable them to forecast their demand closer to the season. Accuracy, therefore, is significantly improved and reduces slow-moving or dead inventory. More robust forecasts act as an essential enabler of sustainable supply chains.

Track & Trace

Each fabric roll is given a barcode which tracks its movement from cutting through garmenting and packaging.

An initiative that has helped us immensely is our acclaimed ‘Track & Trace’ mega project. Track & Trace is one of our projects which has helped us immensely in reducing paper usage. Each fabric roll is assigned a barcode, and this code is used to scan it for all purposes -entry, storage, cutting, and shipping. This is leading to improved transparency in the supply chain. Additionally, it resulted in greater agility, lower cost, and higher visibility of fabric/garment movement. It also reduced manual data entry at multiple points, which is another focus area we had in our mind. This initiative’s end-to-end nature ensures that our efficiency at each stage (warehouse, cutting, sewing, packing, and shipping) is measurable and provides us with rich data for taking steps to improve it further. Before this initiative, the manual receiving from the mills and fabrics utilized our resources- time and effort inefficiently.

Track & Trace has improved the transparency along Shahi’s supply chain. Each fabric roll is assigned a barcode, and this code is used to scan it for all purposes -entry, storage, cutting, and shipping. Currently, we are working on the last phase of Track & Trace that will complete the entire chain by improving transparency at the packaging and delivery stages of the shipment to our customers.

Securing our digital assets

With more and more devices, web applications, and mobile apps connecting to the network, it becomes imperative to ensure no hindrance in business continuity. We must neutralize external threat actors before they can steal crucial data or damage the network infrastructure. Shahi Exports took considerable strides in ensuring that our data center, network, and applications on the cloud are best in class and our information security solutions and practices are of the highest possible standard.

Data is the new oil, and leveraging its value will give precious actionable insights and potentially impact business models. The future at Shahi will employ data science and analytics in our sustainability strategy, making for some fascinating possibilities for the industry. The ideas we are currently working on show a promising future of scaling up across all our operations. It all starts with encouraging ideas and taking small steps to get to a big solution.

Puneesh Lamba is the Chief Technology Officer at Shahi Exports Pvt. Ltd. He is responsible for building Shahi’s IT & Digital strategy and its execution.

Puneesh carries an experience of 28 years as a Senior IT & Digital Leader across industries in India, the USA, and Europe. He has worked for companies General Electric/Genpact and TATA Consultancy Services as well as Indian Conglomerates like Escorts Ltd., Punj Lloyd, CK Birla Group, and Ballarpur Industries.

Puneesh Lamba, Chief Technical Officer, Shahi Exports

As one of India’s pioneers to embrace disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation, Internet of Things, and Predictive Analytics, Puneesh is a proponent of digital means to enable business strategy for growth. He has won many prestigious awards like CIO100, CIO200, CIO500, Power List, and CIO 1000. He is a jury member at NASSCOM, Frost & Sullivan, and, 9Dot9 media.
January 5, 2022