How Wipro took a leaf out of Toyota’s book

BANGALORE: For all its efforts in absorbing the best quality processes — CMMi, Six Sigma and others — tech major Wipro found the gains from them tapering off. Finally, Wipro found a model in its own backyard — the Toyota Kirloskar plant in Bangalore.

“We adopted the lean manufacturing practice of Toyota for the IT industry. We chose it because the Japanese were successful in making it participatory even to the last level,” Sambuddha Deb, Wipro’s chief quality officer told DNA.

Wipro’s back office operations that handle medical claims and human resource policies for its global customers have an assembly line approach adapting Toyota’s lean manufacturing concept that enables young professionals to work efficiently with clockwork precision.

Wipro Chairman Azim Premji is a stickler for quality, adopting the best processes and investing large sums of money in training his employees to benchmark with the best globally. “We had to learn and we took one-and-a-half years to learn the technique and adapt it to the IT industry,” Deb said.

Wipro has around 330 lean projects out of the over 1100 processes it handles, gaining significant benefits from the nearly seven thousand employees who are practising the Toyota way. “There has been no resistance from employees as we have taken them along, improving on their suggestions and learning as we expanded,” Deb said.

The Wipro experience became a case study for Steve Hamm in his book Bangalore Tiger. On being commissioned by McGraw-Hill Books to write a book on India’s tech industry, the author decided to “tell the story, for simplicity and maximum impact, through the microcosm of one company”.