All entries for Thursday 11 April 2019

MEASURING ORGANISATIONAL CAPABILITY

I am in a very interesting phase of my research. it is more about measuring the organisational capability. This is a very important aspect as well. Once you know what are the problems in the informal manufacturing sector then only you know what you have to do. Establishing this problem gives a clear understanding of the loopholes that need to be filled in. The route that I am taking to understand where this organisation stands is measuring its capabilities. Once you know what are the required capabilities of organisations working in the global value chain then the vision of SSIs will be better defined. The challenge is to research about the required capabilities. I found some literature talking about capabilities and that gives a holistic view of the things. These informal SSIs are working in a very traditional way and are using some really primite methods of working. This makes it tough for them to collaborate with the global companies as they don't have the required capabilities to work in partnership with them. I came across a UCMCCM capability tool which benchmarks an organisational capability against the best practise in the UK. It is exciting stuff at the first sight where you know where your organisation has to be and getting a feedback on the areas where it is lacking. But only after using the tool I realized that the informal SSIs are far from reaching anywhere near the best practice. This tool gives a problem of plenty, to select from various parameters to improve the capability. But I am happy to have this problem. This very next step I think should be is to make a set of right measures on the basis of which I can judge capability of these organisations. One possibility is to measure the capabilities of the best shoe manufacturing business in India against the UCMCCM capability tool. But this puts another question in place. Is there any other organisation in manufacturing sector in India that performs better than the best shoe manufacturing organisation(Relaxo). For instance, Relaxo uses wholesalers to distribute the goods and that might not be the best practice. Then the whole point of benchmarking Relaxo and showing it as best practice in India can be a bit confusing and that might question the whole concept of benchmarking. Esentially my aim should be to identify those capabilities that can act as the right capabilities for the informal SSIs. There are a couple of view points that I can think of.

Firstly, I can think of setting up the guidelines for the excellent organisations. And focus my research and capability development on that model. Because using UCMCCM as the only capability criteria can leave the organisation with a lot of things to do and actually it can confuse them. So first of all I need to focus what are the capabilities that are particularly necessary in order to growth and development of these organisations. My second step stems out of the first. I can identify the capabilities and what they esentially mean in practice. For example, having a personal store rather than a wholesaler can be a sales capability that is relevant in practice. This is something which is not shown in the model but can act as a very important capability. So taking such a practical approach to capability building can also be very useful where you define practices as capabilities. I am looking forward to make a model for it and setting the right mesaures on the basis of which the informal SSIs can be measured.

Saurabh Kukreja : 11 Apr 2019 19:03 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem