Aditya Birla Group has a wide range of products, starting from fashion apparels like Louis Philippe, Allen Solly, Van Heusen, Peter England, People, Forever 21 to their fashion retail store Pantaloons. Beside this, Aditya Birla Group has a presence in many other businesses like Idea Cellular, Aditya Birla Capital, Ultra Tech Cement and their Aluminum and Copper Manufacturing subsidiary Hindalco. The group is known for its strong values and foundation of stakeholder value creation. A $44.3 billion corporation, the Aditya Birla Group is in the League of Fortune 500.
The first time I came across a product from Aditya Birla was during the construction of our house in the year 2007 and one of the products that my father preferred to use was UltraTech Cement. I still remember how everyone could easily recall the brand’s catchy advertisement ‘The Engineer’s Choice’. I hardly remember any of my friends during that period who were not aware of the brand. We were small kids, who didn’t have any reason for remembering cement brands but such was the presence of UltraTech Cement in the Market that everyone knew about it.
The next time I came across something related to Aditya Birla was during my graduation. I was doing my B.Tech from NIT Silchar during the period 2011-15. Silchar is a small town in lower Assam, and there was only a small shopping mall present there during that period. There I came across Peter England, Allen Solly, Van Heusen. I tried formal clothes from Peter England & Van Heusen and casuals from Allen Solly and immediately became a loyal customer of the same. The funny fact is, these brands placed themselves in such a way in the market, that many of the students in our college used to think that they are actually foreign brands. But later on one day, I came to know from a friend of mine that all these brands are owned by Aditya Birla and I was so surprised by this. From that time, I have remained a loyal customer of the same.
During my experience, at my last Organization I had an ethical dilemma with my manager. I was working as the MIS (Management Information Systems) Engineer and during the last day of the financial year of 2017, my manager asked me to take into account some of the outsourced materials which were still in transit and have not reached our stores to achieve the financial targets. As per the procedure, we can take some material into account only after the material has reached our stores, inspected by the stores manager and we receive written clearance for the same. But in this case my manager has asked me ‘verbally’ to consider the material into account and show it in sales figures in that particular financial year to meet his targets. This was against my ethics and I denied to do so. It developed a gap in the relationship between me and my manager as he could not meet his financial year targets due to my denial. After 10 days when the material was finally inspected by the store manager, it was found out that there was a shortage of worth Rs. 2 Crores and the vendor was asked to replenish the same. If I would have taken the same into account that day, the vendor would have received his payment and would have denied making the replacement. This is one of the challenges I faced and at that point, I kept my ethics and values over everything and thus tried make an impact despite the odds.