A journey to corporate excellence

RPG Enterprises, a large business house in India with an annual turnover of around US$1.5 billion is a highly diversified group with major presence in power, tyres, life sciences, communication, transmission, retail and speciality chemical businesses and in financial services. In each of these areas the group aims to attain leadership position through a diversified and yet an integrated approach. Quality management has been recognised as a major competitive tool to propel RPG to global leadership. This has led to the creation of Corporate Quality Centre in the year 1996 to direct and facilitate Quality movement across the group of 30 companies. In view of the group's operational diversity, providing leadership from this centre for organisational benefit has been quite a challenge. The journey towards corporate excellence for the past five years has been quite rewarding. It has three distinct phases; firstly an inward looking phase aimed at establishing Quality systems, processes and human responses across the group companies, followed by an externalising phase by proactively looking at customers, markets and societal issues and lastly addressing appropriate customer sovereignty-driven models.