About Rajesh Kumar

Mr. Rajesh Kumar has more than 21 years of professional experience working at a various position. He has various educational degrees to his feather which makes him seasoned, responsible and practical person.

He has completed his BE-Mechanical in 1995,   Completed his post-graduation in Financial Management in 1999, then completed one year   course of Legal systems and Contract Laws from   National Law School- Bangalore in 2013 and then  completed one year course on Senior Management   Programme from IIM-Calcutta in 2016.

Message to the Youth for developing their Career:

A person should try to work in different areas/department and profiles. This helps him to have a holistic view of the whole business process. Rajesh Kumar having himself worked in 6 different departments says that this one of his greatest strengths and by this he can now understand the pains and the loop points of the other departments and hence can easily plug delays and provide prompt and practical solutions. Rajesh Kumar has worked in Design, project site, Quality, Procurement, Marketing, Management Representative (MR) and now is DGM (Projects). As a project head his responsibility is to meet the cost and timelines of the project, is favored since he has working experiences in the above fields.

Message for Indian SME’s:

Skill development is one of the major factors for the economic growth. Large corporates like L&T are spending huge amounts to develop and train their people. L&T annual budget on human resource development is more than 100cr. SME should also work on similar lines and should develop and TRAIN their employees.

Message to the CEO’s, Business Owners, Vice presidents:

The Technical Knowledge : In your domain is compulsory lower & middle levels, however as you grow in the up to the higher levels, the direct requirement of technical knowledge is very less, it is the financial and the contractual knowledge that help in taking most appropriate business decisions.

Legal Knowledge: In the Globalization era, businesses are becoming more complex, one should have legal knowledge in addition to the technical & financial qualifications. Legal knowledge includes Corporate Laws and contract management both of these are important to be studied. There are many universities and institutes which are offering short term courses or evening classes on the subject, in case full-fledged college cannot be attended while in Job. L&T send 40 engineers every year to take degrees in legal system and Commercial Laws.

Financial Knowledge : Apart from Legal knowledge having financial knowledge is crucial and compulsory for persons to reach and sustain at top positions and take better decisions. Person should be able to understand the financial terms should be able to analyze the financial data and predict and propose the future course of action based on the financial data.

How can the efficiency of people at work be enhanced?

Efficiency of an employee is directly proportional to the layout, ambience, colour coating, neatness of the work place. When you visit any multinational company’s Indian unit, the difference is clearly visible. A Good, neat, colorful environment leads to better productivity.

What are the key ingredients for better workplace?

Employee-employer relation is one of the major ingredients for a better workplace. Employee engagement is necessary and this enhances bonding with organization. More employee engagement reduces attrition rates in a company.

Involve your employees in making decisions, ask for their suggestions. Like if a company owner is thinking of investing in a new machine, he should take suggestions/view of his juniors or even workers. This way the employees will feel engaged and feel proud that they were made part of the decision. It is however not necessary to act upon their all views, and the final decision could always be of the top boss taking all the factors into consideration, but by just asking employees will feel engaged.

It is studied many times and many places that people leaves a company because of people not because of the company.

How can a SME grow Multifold?

Networking

For any industry to grow networking with customers is one of the major areas to work on. The concerned employees should maintain a good liaison with the customers. It is not only a marketing person who should have liaison, all and anyone who is interacting whether be a design engineer or service or contractual should consider networking as one of the major role to play.

Studies reveal that in the contact list of an employee on an average 90% of the contacts are personal, that is scenario where the employee is not networking with the customer. Even in projects where the contract is awarded on the L1 basis, the purchaser normally reaches out to the company whom he has better confidence, whom he know will be available in case anything goes wrong and this confidence does not only come from marketing person, it is the whole team which creates this confidence.

Use of Technology

Use of extensive technology in this era is crucial for growing and saving money. Like for eg video conferencing. L&T has invested in this technology and is able to save 100 of crores by reduction in travelling and early and faster actions. SME should also focus on such tools.

Training of Employees

This is again one of important and neglected part in the SME’s. The employees should be continuously encouraged to learn and proper training to be provided to them. Also there should be knowledge of the other departments by an individual. Iike a design person should have knowledge of contract interpretation and management, typically a person can save upto 2% of the contract value by proper contract management in post order stage.

Contract Management

As explained earlier contract management, contract interpretation should be taught not only to the marketing persons but to all like design engineer, production engineer, service engineer. Once an engineer at these positions can read the contract and identify proper scope he can easily increase company’s profit by 1-2%. One should keep in mind that if we should not give less, we should also not give more.

Working Capital Management

Working capital management is only related to finance deptt. is a myth. This Myth needs to be broken and working capital management should be taught to and practiced by each and every department. For eg let’s say Marketing department should know the current status of the working capital in the company and accordingly should persuade his clients for the payment terms if the working capital is diminishing he should request his customers for advance payments instead of giving credits. Similarly for the production person if the knowledge is available to him he can focus on completions, try to reduce the inventory costs and reduce the cycle time of converting raw materials to finished products.

Risk Assessment

A company should periodically do Risk Assessment. When a Risk is known it is no more a risk since now you have a mitigation plan ready for the same.

So the aim should be to convert unknown Risks to Known Risks with their mitigation plans.

If a SME does the above mentioned it can surely grow multifold, the above should become part and parcel of companies’ culture.

Message for project Managers:

Triple Constraints

Triple constraints is the combination of the three most significant parameters on any project: scope, schedule and cost.

For a project manager all the important not only one.

Now a 4th dimension to the same has been added which is quality

Interview Dated: 16.12.17