The Anexas Story - Chapter 20: Expanding the Horizons – the Revolving Globe

Thanks for showing so much love to my book – The Anexas Story. Based on many requests to publish chapters of the book on LinkedIn, I continue to write a series of articles based on these chapters. Please read on and keep believing that there is an entrepreneur in you…and everyone! 

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They say that if you want to maintain the energy levels in the company, keep up with its start-up culture. However, that might mean that you keep doing what you did, the way you did when you started. This has a risk. You might end up syncing the life-cycle of your organization with the life cycle of the product or service you started with.

The products and services have shorter life cycles. But not the companies, or at least that’s what we aim for – to make the companies last long. If you want to sustain for a long time, you need to disorient and disrupt, and that might mean disruption on many fronts, be it culture, products, services, market segments, customers or even the team.

There is a football-sized globe on my table in the Bangalore office. Many a time, I use it to show the location of the country of our next assignment to the team members. I feel like a General marshalling his troops in some Austrian or Greek town back in WW II.

Considering the locations where Anexas consultants were to deliver services in the next few years, I remember a joke. In the office, they used to say that we would crazily spin the globe like a roulette and stop that with the forefinger placed on a random location, making that city the place of our next assignment!

Anyway, our team was so hard-working that it gladly delivered even at challenging locations. Therefore, expansion of Anexas to UAE with two new offices and clientele in Germany, Denmark, UK, US, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Philippines, Myanmar, Vietnam, Singapore, Korea and Russia was waiting to happen.

Sometimes, we proudly say that Anexas is an Indian company with operations in countries outside of India. I can even go on to say that it is more popular in countries other than India. How did it happen? Not so easily. After three years of an unbeaten run in India, Saudi Arabia and Denmark, we started getting a sense of competition. Many organizations and sometimes our own students had by then started similar services which started reducing our margin. So, innovation helped us.

Innovation is not always in a product or a design. It can be there in markets, it can be incorporated in the process or in the way you offer your services. It can also be in your aftersales service. We started exploring new markets. In the Middle East, while my team carried on the good work in Saudi Arabia, I started exploring nearby countries like UAE, Bahrain and Oman. After several trips and presentations in GCC countries, one of the largest oil companies in Abu Dhabi appeared to be interested.

Yet convincing them to hire our services was not easy. How do you define passion? One way of defining it would be that if you are prepared to work on something for free, fully believing in your capabilities, then you are passionate about it. When we wished to expand to new countries and explore new markets, this passion came in handy.

I usually keep my running shoes on to look around for the new opportunities. When they come by, to grab them you need to convince the clients about your capabilities and its subsequent success. If you are passionate, it is so easy to convince using a simple technique, which we had used earlier and used it again with this oil company, which facilitated our entry into another Gulf country. In one of the meetings, the VP of this prospective client, Christopher, commented, “Never heard of you guys. Moreover, I see that you are making tall claims, like you said you can reduce rig move times by half? Can you really? We have struggled with it for more than ten years and it still remains at seven days!”

“Yes, we can,” I said.

“How can you prove it?”

“By doing a project and reducing it to three days!”

“How can you? We have not even awarded you the project!”

“You don’t have to. Just give us three months and a group of engineers who can spend a cumulative sixty hours with us during this time. We will make it happen. And won’t charge you a penny for it!”

“Well, we can take care of your travel and hotel stay expenses, if you want,” prospective clients can be also reasonable sometimes.

“That’s it then” I smiled.

“Then go ahead,” Christopher gave the green signal.

Within a month I conducted a Black Belt training for their thirteen engineers. On the last day of training, we made a project plan which was to be executed over the next three months. We added three dozen more members to the project team, which interestingly consisted of twelve nationalities representing five continents. The Manager spoke English and Spanish, engineers spoke Arabic, Hindi and Malayalam. The operators spoke Punjabi, Urdu and Bengali. However, everyone could understand one common language - the language of Six Sigma.

Three members of the team were assigned the job of collecting data on the existing performance of oil rigs and four others mapped the processes. Within ten days we assembled again, analyzed the data and zeroed down on the causes which delayed the rig move time. One more full day of brainstorming and we selected more than eighteen ideas to reduce the time without any significant investment. We also made it a point to assign each idea to its originator. Steve had contributed three significant ideas and we acknowledged that. We also assigned him the job of documenting the ideas and implementing them, he being one of the most enthusiastic Black Belt.

While the team was doing its job, it did face a lot of skepticism. One of the drilling contractors commented, “Oh, this year again you guys are attempting the same thing? I will wait to hear about your failure after three months. Ha, ha, ha!”

Others may not have had, but we had confidence in ourselves. For us, failure was not an option. The only option was to act, and succeed. We involved the field workers, crane drivers, and drilling engineers and started getting approvals and implementing those suggestions. While executing the solutions, one of the forklift drivers, Kutty, gave a suggestion, which was not part of our solution. It involved simply synchronizing the way three equipment were moved during the preparation for the rig move.

Power of this idea was more than the eighteen ideas we had put together! In the next meeting, Steve while documenting the project, included this idea as his own contribution. I told him to change it and assign it to the forklift driver. Steve argued, “But why do you want to give him the credit? Kutty is not even part of our Six Sigma team. It was me who made him generate the idea during our conversation.”

I remembered a billboard which got installed in my mind seventeen years back after going through a similar situation (described in the next incident) and said, “No, it still is his idea. Kutty is the author, you know!” Steve gave in and agreed with me.

So, now armed with nineteen ideas and into the second month of project execution, we were able to implement eight of them after taking clearances from health and safety department and senior managers. And in the third month, rig move time reduced to three days.

We made it happen. The project was published and presented in renowned oil journals and petrochemical conferences in the Middle East. It also made its way to one of the world conferences in the US organized by the American Society of Quality, where I proudly presented the work done by us, for which we had charged no fee!

Of course, we bagged a big contract after this efficacious demonstration of capabilities of Lean Six Sigma, often brushed aside as a management fad by many. And that was not the only time we were known to have demonstrated such competencies.

By offering free services, you have nothing to lose, except your inhibitions, fear and misfortune!

Sometimes, you only lose your pants. It’s okay!!

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For subsequent articles, please watch this space.

You can buy the book directly from its website on https://www.anexasstory.com

or on Amazon on https://www.amazon.in/ANEXAS-STORY-There-Entrepreneur-Everyone-ebook/dp/B07ZGLN8C7

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Amitabh Saxena is founder of Anexas, a well-known lean six sigma and project management consulting organisation. He has trained over 50,000 participants and has 30 years of experience in consulting more than 300 organisations around the world including Fortune 100 companies across industry domains. With a strong team of 25 Master Black Belts, his organisation Anexas has been helping individuals and organisations achieve eminence through excellence since 2006. They can be reached on [email protected].