Business Excellence Through Process Improvement – The Godrej Appliances Division (B)

Godrej Appliances Division (GAD) of Godrej & Boyce manufacturing company limited – which had been around for more than 60 years and was the first company to manufacture refrigerators in India – began to face intense competition in the early to late 2000s due to the entry of multinational companies (MNCs), such as LG and Samsung, after liberalization of the Indian economy. GAD had been among the Top 3 players in the industry until the entry of the MNCs, and subsequently, their market share fell by half to 13% in the late 1990s and further decreased to 6% by 2010.

To improve their competitiveness, to benchmark with industry best practices, and to get feedback from the assessment process, GAD chose to participate in the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Business Excellence (BE) award, modelled after EFQM, from 2011 onward.

The objective was to use this feedback to identify their internal gaps vis-à-vis the competition and improve the respective processes in order to regain their market share. The case describes how GAD made use of the EFQM philosophy and the award criteria to completely revamp their processes and bridge gaps with the competition. They focused on the five enablers: (1) Leadership (2) Strategy (3) People (4) Partnerships & Resources and (5) Processes, Products & Services, to improve their business and organizational processes.

These efforts paid off, and GAD progressively improved their products and processes during the next several years, finally achieving the CII-BE award in 2019. Case A ends with a list of operational capabilities that GAD acquired in the process and how they can exploit them, just when COVID-19 pandemic hit India. Case B then goes on to describe how GAD made use of these capabilities to quickly develop and introduce new products that were urgently needed in the country, to address the challenges posed by the pandemic.