From ‘pantaloons’ as a kid to ‘Peter England’ as a grown adult, Aditya Birla Group has somehow miraculously managed to keep abreast with my 25 years of existence on this planet. Of course, there were times when the connection seemed a little weak or lost for a brief moment, but that’s when Idea cellular came to the rescue and made it even stronger. But having said all that, it wasn’t until my early twenties when I actually got the holistic view of these brands under the cap of big bad ABG. That’s when I started acknowledging these brands as one entity. It’s indeed funny how the casual attitude portrayed by me towards these brand as a child and teenager, has now as culminated into feeling of Awe. This 'awe' is nothing but an epitome of the herculean impact that ABG as a brand has made.
Now coming to the impact that I have made, I was given the responsibility of leading a 7-member team for implementing quality control protocols at a new third-party manufacturing facility just one month before our commercial production. It was for manufacturing of the company’s bottled beverage. The facility was very poor in terms of cleanliness, hygiene and quality. But other facilities explored already had a very high cost of operation, which would have made the end product noncompetitive in the price-sensitive market. Hence, owing to such constraint we had to make it work.
Also, the earlier pilot trials taken at the facility had witnessed microbial activity in the final product within just a week of production. This was the cause of deep concern for the management. To counter it, I laid down a 7-day action plan to nullify the susceptibility of the microbial contamination. We brought out numerous radical changes to the shop floor area which ensured that the product quality was supervised at various critical control points in the process. During the implementation, some of us had to even stay at the plant overnight which might seem minuscule but the plant was remotely located and hence we were running short and food and supplies. But the learning in itself was quite humongous. We also had a lot of assistance from the plant labor and the support staff as well. We, in turn, got an opportunity to teach them good manufacturing practices and enlighten them about the importance of good hygiene.
Unfortunately, the outcome of this activity wasn’t a clean success. Although the microbial contamination in the end product was reduced substantially, it was still above the accepted standards. Since there seemed no further room for improvement at the plant level, the management had no choice but to introduce food-grade preservatives.
On a personal front, this was my first ever professional team exercise. And although it didn’t bear any solid fruit but me, along with all of my team members could feel the positives of working in a team. A team which also comprised of the plant workers and efforts put by them. We could actually gauge the quantification of our honest work. We did feel content about it. Secondly, another important lesson learnt from the activity was acknowledging the very fact that it is not always mandatory for sincere efforts to culminate into success. It is perfectly okay to fail. In fact, it taught us that the true path to success is through the fear of failure. if you aren't scared enough of failing, your unlikely to succeed. It's definitely not pleasant to fail, its tough. All of us experience it. But it is our response to failure that actually help buffer the reverses that we experience. That was the greatest takeaway.
