When Sudhanshu Singhal took over as the chief executive officer at Kanoria Africa Textiles PLC,the country’s first green and vertically integrated denim plant, less than a year back, the organisation was roughing it out with mounting YoY financial losses. The situation changed by end March-April 2021 as the company witnessed a remarkable turnaround, and now confidently marches on. What were the best practices that Singhal followed?How did he go about it? Read it in his own words.

It’s been eight months since I began my journey in Ethiopia as the CEO at Kanoria Africa Textiles PLC (KAT). I had always believed during my earlier and sporadic visits that the country had immense potential with its people, culture, location and business policies, and all of it waiting to be explored and leveraged. It’s been an amazing experience since then.

As I took over, the biggest challenge was to not only sustain safety and motivation of our people, but also deliver performance and profitability. The organisation was going through a difficult time with mounting YoY financial losses with not a single year of cash profits since inception, partly perhaps due to start-up hassles and gearing. Also, the average operations performance, productivity and other industrial relations/worker/ local issues which are commonly faced by most establishments in the country. The issues got bigger due to the covid-19 situation where exports earnings dried up both for the company as also the country; imports of basic readymade became increasingly difficult.

When we put together a team, we started working on various initiatives in October-November 2020 and fortunately enough, we did deliver a remarkable turnaround by end of March-April 2021, and continue now towards becoming a benchmark operation in 2021–22. I will cover a few things that we did as part of our action plan:

• Enhanced participation across all levels of employees: We put together a detailed business plan to be implemented in the next six months and onwards; involved each and every member to discuss and own the plan and the role each one could play in achieving the numbers, also explaining the roadmap to achieve these, which obviously looked impossible looking into our past achievements.

• Set up clearly measurables targets and continual improvement process: We worked on targets and explained how these could be achieved basis an analysis of past performances on why we could not achieve the same and what factors created the impact. We took the monitoring of targets and factors influencing these to the operating teams based on bi-hourly reports. At the same time, we worked on instituting rewards and recognition across all sections on achieving the targets. The best achieved performance then became the internal benchmark and a thorough analysis of what went “right” on that day. To support this entire exercise, we put up a dedicated team to work on improvement projects and sharing through them the findings to the operations team and assist in debottlenecking/enabling the findings.

• Localisation of spares: We explored the opportunity to create machine parts in our in-house workshop, also developing the mechanical and electronic workshop and could ensure a few of parts and ICs could be made/developed/repaired by our engineering teams and ensure continuity of all machines whilst we managed imports. The three steps not only increased our output by almost 35 per cent but also started achieving them with consistency.

• Improve overall hygiene and work environment to ensure KAT was the best place to work in: We started working on improving campus hygiene, workstations for staff, canteen area, and also a rigorous engagement with people at all levels. We proactively engaged with people, explaining them the business challenges, solving their issues, sorting out HR processes, and ensuring there is requisite transparency to management actions towards people. The engagement also ensured that people could raise issues directly and on time and seek resolution or understanding. The processes with pictures were shared with the immediate environment to create a larger buy-in and positivity towards actions being taken quickly by management. All these were well received by both society and our people.

• Product development and quality: As part of a larger strategy roadmap, we initiated rigorous product development towards value-added products and quality enhancement. This required creating huge awareness and centricity towards consumer preferences on service, quality and products. The consumer touchpoints were beefed up. The concept of consumer vs customer was emphasised (still in process) to ensure that whilst we do operate in a B2B market mostly, the product and marketing teams remain sensitive to consumers as if they would buy more, they will be our direct customers.

• Enhanced stakeholder ship: Again, as part of quick ramp-up for value-added products and also to de-risk and operate capex lite, we explored strategic partnerships with small/medium complaints set up around us and assisted them with our quality and product teams to bring them up to speed and desired expectations. We supported these with raw material and business and thus were able to create an extremely “responsive” and “agile” supply chain towards servicing our customers. This also helped us to grow our VA products volumes to almost 3-4x from levels in October with much improved and acceptable standards of quality. Also, we could provide indirect employment to 1,000 manpower other than our own 1,200.

• Securing raw material: Despite raw material challenges, we could secure our requirement seamlessly and continue operations without interruption. We went out aggressively in the market and maintained a great management information system (MIS) and dialogue with the sources and acted proactively to ensure securing our requirements without pre-blocking our funds in advances.

• Development of new customers and markets: With performance and product enhancements, we started reaching out to new customers and markets while re-enforcing the existing ones. A few customers liked our products and started initiating enquiry, and at the same time we received feedback which was taken positively by the team. This also helped us in improving and enriching our offers further. The process continues.

As a result, as we stand today, we delivered a remarkable financial performance over Q3 and Q4 for 2020–21, and now poised—not only hopeful but confident—to deliver a benchmark industry performance from the region in the coming years and be comparable to the global industry best in the future years.

A transformation of sorts we achieved. While problems there were aplenty, so too were the solutions. It all boils down to what we focus on and how dedicated and together we remain as a team. It depends upon how much self-belief we have in ourselves and the team and how much pain we are ready to take in our endeavour to ensure satisfying performances and celebrate at the end.

I have always believed nothing comes easy, surely not the excellence, and if anyone ever thought that this was easy then perhaps the benchmarking was not appropriate or the understanding of the same, but at the same time nothing really is impossible too! We have to keep going with conviction, cohesion and resilience.

This article was first published in the July 2021 edition of the print magazine.