Part A
Aditya Birla Group is an Indian multinational Conglomerate progressing towards excellence for last 162 years. With its goal to be omnipresent, ABG has penetrated every domain of social and industrial life including agribusiness, cement, chemicals, E-commerce, Finance, Mining, retail, telecommunication, textile, wind power and non-ferrous metals. If you pick a product or service from market, the probability that product or service being a part of ABG is very high. We all are surrounded by the contribution of ABG. Starting with your home, the main ingredient of the construction is cement and ultra tech cement is the largest cement manufacturing company in India. We use the telecommunication services every day and again ABG is there with Idea cellular. If we further penetrate in our life, the ABG is also there in fashion segment with highly prominent brands like Louis Philippe, Allen Solly, van Heusen, peter England and Pantaloons. In Financial services, it has a strong presence across life insurance, asset management, housing finance, equity and commodity under the umbrella brand of Aditya Birla Capital (ABC). Even in a small city of Bharuch- Gujarat, where I belong to, there is a copper producing unit in Dahej under the brand name of Hindalco.
In addition to be a leader in corporate world, ABG has been contributing to the society via different CSR activities. K.K. Birla Foundation has been promoting literature and arts by felicitating different awards and scholarships. Also the ABG works in 5000 villages reaching out to 7.5 million people with its global investment of Rs. 500 crores in CSR activities.
May it be our social life or professional life, the presence of ABG is group is so significant that it has become the epicenter of our daily life.
Part B
ABG was founded back in 1857 and for a company to be dominant in corporate world over 162 years is not an easy task. And despite the challenges of globalization and innovation, ABG has not only managed to maintain its supremacy but also able to expand its domain and product line. This was made possible because of its sheer will to accept and conquer the challenges.
I too faced many challenges in my life but the biggest challenge I faced was during my training period in professional life. There I was assigned a task of reducing the cycle time of the most critical station in an international metro manufacturing project. After only few weeks of my training, receiving such a task was an immense challenge and I was in dilemma to how to proceed. But I did not panic, instead started working on the task. I brainstormed different approaches and finally decided to go for a time study to find out the non-value added activities and 7 wastes in the station activities. I did the time study for 5 days working 9.5 hours a day and made the report according to time study and revamped the layout of the station. The result was promising and the cycle time reduced by 40% and for my performance, I was appointed as a production supervisor in that international project.
So in summary, it can be concluded that it all depends on how you take the challenges because if we work hard the challenges can be transformed into an opportunity and for me it was a ticket to be part of an international project.