Cost Congress rejects pink slips as cost cutting measure

In the backdrop of the ongoing global economic crisis, enterprises are cutting costs by issuing pink slips. This is not an intelligent option as human element is the potent mode to augmenting commerce when the economic cycles restore, providing a competitive edge, said Jitesh Khosla, joint secretary, union ministry of corporate affairs. 

He was speaking at the Cost Congress 2008 organised by Confederation of Indian Industry's  'total cost management (TCM) division, on "Connecting Enterprise Excellence to the Bottom of Pyramid".

Khosla said "Over the last 20 years, India has seen an era of unprecedented growth, but has not encountered a downturn. This calls for adopting smart strategies, by concentrating more on the bottom of pyramid, which exposes commerce to a whole universe of growth' he added. He also reiterated for the need to align Indian accounting systems with the globally followed practices.

Urging on the need for fastening up stabilisation process for the corporate,  Gary Cokins, global products marketing manager, SAS Institute Inc, USA, said, "Performance management is an integral part of TCM, since the real value for corporate comes from analytical and business intelligence which act as the drivers for optimal management. Performance management can be achieved by integrating strategies with existing global methodologies like six sigma, kaizen and the likes. Also corporate should attempt to take their employees in confidence before strategizing policies.'

He further added ''Budgets allocated for the sales & marketing department should be treated as scarce resource.  The finance department should help sales & marketing department in generating high long term profits by optimally utilizing the allocated budget. A shift in the CFO's emphasis can be of tremendous importance for the companies to better target customers.'' 

P Thiruvengadam senior director, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India P Ltd, said, "Cost management needs to tune itself with the requirements of the customers, using various world class tools and methodologies. At present we should not only look at cost but value oriented perspective of cost. CII has been one of the active propagators of following smart TCM ideologies."
 
Paving way for the Indian companies to follow world class cost management models, earlier in his welcome address, A N Raman, chairman, Cost Congress 2008, said "CII operates an exclusive working group on TCM, which imbibes strategies for revenue models to facilitate cost competition for manufacturing and services industries. We are confident that the two day event will explore high-value, low-cost domains of management."