The increasing global competition between manufacturing organizations has led many of them to implement different management systems against the competition. Although, the available various standards influenced them to integrate the subsystems to optimize resources and skills and minimize cost (Almeida, Domingues & Sampaio 2014). Steel has been one of the core materials that allowed the world to reach a developed position. It is used in manufacturing machines and building housing and commercial projects with its varied types (Goyal & Sharma 2017).
The metals and mining industry faces a competitive environment because of the excess supply and decreasing commodity prices. The global steel market suffers from the slow of the manufacturing sector and low investments in the advanced economies. The modest growth of the advanced economies is a result of low productivity, uncertain political conditions and slowdown in activities. Despite this, India steel industry witnesses bright prospects due to the supporting policies of the government to enhance the infrastructure, facilitate the manufacturing process and attract foreign investments (TATA Steel LTD. 2015-2016a).
TATA Steel is one of the largest private owned integrated steel manufacturers in India. Over the years, the company continued to create value and maintained its social responsibility towards its stakeholders. The company has an operating structure that ensures it can achieve its desired goals (TATA Steel LTD. 2015-2016a).
The following section analyzes different issues, including portfolio, integrated organization perspectives and competitiveness, business model innovation and technological innovation through strategic alliances, M&As and corporate governance, CSR, sustainability and leadership. These issues will be applied to TATA Steel to evaluate its success in managing its internal organization, competitiveness, innovation, expansion strategies and CSR.
Holistic management allows organizations to share resources, including material, information, human, infrastructure and financial resources. This process leads to subsystems of valuation of the synergies of common aspects across different standards that improve the organizational profitability and efficiency. This managerial style promotes a management model that can be integrated with the requirements of other organizations according to their point of view. Although, this approach of integrating different management systems was argued for preventing innovation.
The integrated management system (IMS) is cost-effective, it uses fewer resources compared to the non-integrated system. In an integrated process, a set of requirements can be integrated and shared among different subsystems, but there will be some requirements that cannot be integrated with them. The ability of the requirements to be shared among subsystems represents the integration degree (Almeida, Domingues & Sampaio 2014; Packendorff 1994).
Modern organizations usually integrate their control system, the current trend is creating value for the shareholders through integrating the financial and strategic planning in the human resource management. This approach enables managers to identify the qualitative goals for individuals and groups and different ways for achieving these goals. According to Grant (2008), as cited in Sergio (2011), every organization has its own internal environment and operates in the external environment. The organization internal environment is determined by the goals, objectives, values, resources, capabilities and systems. The external environment has many aspects; economic, political, social and legal. There are different actors that take place in the external environment, including the customers, competitors and suppliers. This environment is dynamic that is why organizations develop strategies to align their internal environment with the external environment. Bad planning or the wrong estimation of the external environment may lead to organizational failure and quit from the industry or a certain market (Jordan 2013).
Approaching the integrated management system enables organizations of standardization of the business processes. They tend to maintain synergy and harmony among the integrated parts of the system that enable them to increase their excellence. The partial management systems are to be developed according to the standards or based on them to represent a highly complex structure and interrelated connections. Although the integrated management system is problematic due to the high number of partial systems that operates within the same organization, problems occuer in implementing the parallel subsystems, coordination problems that occur and the organization is exposed to cost increase like maintenance cost (Majstorovic & Majstorovic 2011).
Value creation, change or destroy happens through the organization business model. The organizational business model that represents the chosen system of inputs, processing and output. It aims to create value in different time frames; the short-run, medium and long-run (International Integrated Reporting Council 2013). Value creation represents a core concept in management, it reflects the various motives to create value within organizations. It spans the inter-firm networks, starting from the supply chain to innovation. Value creation not only creates an organizational competitive advantage compared to its competitors, but also it creates value for the customers as well (Ritala & Tidstrom 2014).
The integrated steel plant manufacturers’ steel from the basic raw materials, like iron ore, coking coal and fluxes. Raw material, sinter plant, blast furnace, light and medium merchant mills, handling plants, coke ovens refractory material plant, steel melt shops, wire rod mills, structural mills, special bar and structural mills and medium merchant represent the main production units. The auxiliary units include engineering shops, power plant and oxygen plant. Steel the steel melt shop represent the further refining facility, where blooms are produced (Acharyulu, Subbaiah & Rao 2015).
The portfolio represents the collection of projects through which the organization transforms its businesses. The organizational goals may include areas that are likely to move the organization forward. The projects represent the part of work designed to achieve these goals, portfolio management requires, projects prioritization according to the organizational goals, selection of the projects that are aligned to the business goals, budget and available resources, flexibility of correction according to changes in priorities and ensuring that the project output leads to the business measurable outcomes. It is necessary for organizations to understand the environment in which they operate and respond to its changes. According to the portfolio management approach, every major project in any department should be aligned to the same overall portfolio management approach. Every project manager should act in the same discipline and participate in the same portfolio (Jordan 2013).
In accordance with the vision of Tata Steel, the company utilizes value creation and corporate governance to aspires to be the global steel industry benchmark. The company conducts the necessary activities to realize its vision by achieving its value creation goals, following safety standards, respecting the environmental aspects and responds to societal needs (TATA Steel LTD. 2015).
TATA process of value creation is achieved by converting the raw materials into customized steel products that fulfill the customer needs. The business model represents the core value creation, it represents the well-integrated operations of steel manufacturing starting from mining to making steel and the other downstream processing. The produced output of flat and long products and solid waste. It draws inputs from different sources of capital, enhances its competitive position and brand image. The company maintains a long-term strategic focus on value creation for the stakeholders. It also depends on innovation in product development to adapt to the environmental changes through leveraging technology, improving resource efficiency and increasing the utilization of solid waste. The global steel industry witness oversupply and the sharp depreciation strategy of currencies adopted by some countries that further complicated the problem. TATA Steel aligns its strategy to the group strategy that resulted in its current adopted strategy of maintaining its leadership position in terms of operational excellence and cost competitiveness. This strategy is accelerated through the Shikhar-25 program that focuses on achieving 25% earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization compared at market priced raw material within 2-3 years. It is a multi-divisional, multi-location, cross-functional improvement initiative that aims to excel across the entire steel value chain (TATA Steel LTD. 2015-2016a). According to the previous analysis, both forms of integrated organization perspective and the portfolio management approach are applied within TATA steel.
The business model innovation has been developed for centuries, currently, many changes take place in the model because of the speed and scale of changing the environment. For example, the innovative development of Apple iPod and iTunes online music and the Skype low-cost global cost (Oliveira & Ferreira 2011). Marianne Jelinek, as cited in Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel (1998), developed the institutionalizing innovation in order to systematize behavior within organizations.
Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) represent good strategies of expanding and enhancing corporate innovation performance. Also, it enhances the R&D activities and increases the organization’s ability to absorb new technology that enhances the corporate innovation performance. Despite their advantages, some scholars believe that M&A hinder the organization innovation performance. It could result in changes in the structure and processes of the internal organization. These changes could extend to the market competition and increase the external cost of R&D (Zhang et al. 2018).
M&A steel manufacturing deals were actively made before 2010, then they witnessed a decline. The Indian companies faced problems in raising their financial resources. Despite this, India became one of the leading world countries in terms of M&A, including the steel industry (Singh 2012).
The main driver of the Indian organizations overseas is accessing the international markets, acquire firm-specific technology and talent acquisition, benefit from the business synergy, operate in the highly competitive business environment and overcome the constraints of the home country. M&A of Indian organizations take the form of greenfield investment due to the lack of resources for industrialization. The governmental policies allowed outward investment that takes the form of joint ventures where the Indian company share should not exceed the 49%. (Pradhan & Abraham 2014).
The steel industry is rapidly growing, it operates in a dynamic and high demanding market. M&A of steelmakers by non-steelmakers also witness rapid growth. The M&A in the steel industry either vertically merged or acquired by the other organizations, like the financial institutions are also growing in the same trend (Huh 2015).
Innovation enables organizations to produce steel with less weight, for example, to reduce the weight of the vehicle by saving 30-40% savings in their body weight. Also, it enables producing high strength steel and forming techniques that take the form of tailored blanks and hydroforming (Neuhoff et al. 2014).
In order to sustain its leading position in the global steel industry, TATA continuous to introduce innovative products, including the introduction of prefabricated vertical drains to be used in the construction of the Slime Dam at Noamundi. It enhances the dam stability after achieving the required storage capacity. Also, it introduced the Man-Riding system for people transportation and a light load in the underground mines (TATA Steel LTD. 2015-2016a). The R&D at the company has developed many innovative ways of production, like the high-end methodology to produce superior quality metallurgical coke that has never been achieved in the history of coke making at the company. It saves about US$ 10 million per annum (TATA Steel LTD. 2014-2015).
The company milestones are represented in capacity expansions and accumulation of production facilities to maintain its position as a market leader in a rapid-growing market. Alongside its manufacturing expansion, the company has transformed to the green technology in manufacturing to achieve greater operational efficiencies (TATA Steel LTD. 2015-2016a; TATA Steel LTD. 2015-2016b).
Good corporate governance (CG) refers to the organizational commitment to ethical practices and adoption across its value chain activities. Organizations have to develop a code of conduct and communicate them with the staff to ensure they are well practiced. Leaders play a vital role in leading by example and align their practices to the organizational goals. Managers should focus on the sustainability of business models rather than generating revenues. The executive directors’ compensation scheme should stem from an objective performance evaluation process by the board. Transparency and disclosure are important through the closure of financial and non-financial measures (Goyal & Sharma 2017).
There are number of indicators of the CG of organizations, including the legal compliance indicator and the board efficiency that measures; the promoter stake, the number of directors, the number of independent directors and their percentage in the audit committee (Mishra & Mohanty 2014).
The steel industry philosophy in corporate governance stresses in reporting, disclosure and transparency to conform to the laws, guidelines and regulation with a major aim of enhancing the shareholders’ value. The companies in the steel industry aim for the overall welfare of all of the system constituents. They have laid a strong foundation for sustaining corporate governance as an everyday life experience. They form core groups of top-level executives and company leading professionals of technology and innovation (Goyal & Sharma 2017; Pauliuk & Müller 2014).
TATA steel founder was a nation builder rather than a profit seeker. The social capital for TATA has a high importance that is represented in the formal and informal subsidiaries of the company. They act to serve the nation, states, local communities and the ecosystem. The company is socially accountable respect the law and human rights. The company action policies were changed from giving to the society to creating an enabling environment and creating self-sustained communities. It spends about 204 crores on the social activities and it encourages its partners and employees to be socially committed through the volunteering programs guided by the company (TATA Steel LTD. 2015-2016a).
Tata Steel CG follows best practices and guidance, it considers disclosure as their inherent responsibility. It maintains timely and accurate information delivery to its stakeholders regarding finance, performance and leadership. The board has adopted the guidelines of their effectiveness in order to fulfill the CG responsibility towards stakeholders. The board has the required authority to evaluate the company operations and make decisions independent from the management to keep the company’s long-term commitment towards its stakeholders. The board-level stakeholders’ relationship committee role is to examine and redress the shareholders’ complaints and disclose the status to the entire board. Also, the company encourages and funds the green initiatives undertaken by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (TATA Steel LTD. 2015).
The industry leaders compete for operation efficiency rather than producing mostly commodity products in order to increase their market share and introduce more sophisticated products. The steel industry needs to have benchmark efficient players who can use technology in basic steel production and processing and adopt the diverse industry tools throughout the entire value chain. Previously, the control and leadership used to go to who can control the main resources required for production and can excel in operational efficiency. The future is for those organizations that can adapt to the most agile players who can afford to the fast-changing environment and introduce innovative products (Chalabyan, Mori & Vercammen 2018).
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the discretionary corporate resource allocation that improves the social welfare, which enhances the relationships with core stakeholders. CSR is considered a subset of CG that focuses on the relationships with the corporate societal and community stakeholders. It gives the corporation a distinguished role with the nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations. CSR could take the form of legal responsibility or the behavior in an ethical manner. In India, CSR acts as a key influence on business activities, government and society relationships. There are four approaches that take place in India, Gandhi, Nehru, Friedman, and Freeman CSR models. The ethical model of Gandhi focuses on the voluntarily corporate commitment to the public welfare, where the statist (Nehruvian) model assumes that the determinants of the CR are the state ownership and the legal requirements, while the liberal (Friedman) model assumes that CR is limited to the private owners and the stakeholder (Freeman) model assumes that the corporates respond to the stakeholders’ needs. These arguments represent classifications to the concept of CSR, but they are not mutually exclusive (Arevalo & Aravind 2011).
The various issues discussed in this report are very important to me, they enhanced my knowledge of the global steel market that suffers from the slow of the manufacturing sector and low investments in the developed countries. The different factors that networked to slow the industry growth are complex due to their relevance to the advanced economies low productivity, uncertain political conditions and slowdown in activities.
The report also highlighted the importance of value creation that represents a core concept in management, it reflects the various motives to create value within organizations. Its ability to span the inter-firm networks, starting from the supply chain to innovation.
I could clearly understand the integrated steel plant manufacturing, starting from the basic raw materials to the final products. Also, I realized the role of the auxiliary units including engineering shops, power plant and oxygen plant.
It is also very important to me to understand the business model innovation that has to adapt to the speed and scale of the changing the environment. In addition, M&A represent good strategies of expanding and enhancing corporate innovation performance in the global steel industry. M&A steel manufacturing deals were actively made before 2010, then they witnessed a decline. I could realize that the Indian companies faced problems in raising their financial resources, but they became among the leading world countries in terms of M&A, including the steel industry.
Moreover, the governmental efforts encouraged the Indian steel manufacturers to invest overseas, where they could access the international markets, acquire firm-specific technology and talent acquisition, benefit from the business synergy, operate in the highly competitive business environment and overcome the constraints of the home country. M&A of Indian organizations take the form of greenfield investment due to the lack of resources for industrialization.
In addition, I could generally understand the CG philosophy and the specific Indian CG and steel industry philosophy, disclosure and transparency to conform to the laws, guidelines and regulation with a major aim of enhancing the shareholders’ value. It was interesting to realize the fact that the companies in the steel industry aim for the overall welfare of all of the system constituents and they could lay a strong foundation for sustaining CG as an everyday life experience.
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