Sanjiv Lal is the former Managing Director and CEO of Rallis India Ltd. He is a B.Tech graduate in Chemical Engineering from IIT Delhi (Class of 1983), and he has participated in executive development programs, including the Management Development Program at IMD Switzerland in 2000 and the Tata Strategic Leadership Program in 2007.

Sanjiv brings a wealth of experience from his time as the Chief Operating Officer of Tata Chemicals’ India Chemicals Business, before taking the helm at Rallis. Since joining Tata Chemicals in 2004, he has held several key leadership roles—overseeing manufacturing operations at two major units, managing the Agri Retail Business, and spearheading Organizational Transformation & Business Excellence initiatives. He also led the Information Technology function and was appointed Joint Managing Director of Tata Chemicals’ joint venture in Morocco.

Prior to his tenure at Tata Chemicals, Sanjiv spent 21 years with Hindustan Unilever, where he worked in various roles across the manufacturing and the speciality chemicals sector.

• In this episode, Sanjiv Lal discusses Process excellence in a technology-driven business landscape. He begins by talking about the Tata Business Excellence Model based on the Malcolm Baldrige criteria, which looks at various operational and business excellence aspects, such as leadership, strategy, customer satisfaction, etc.
• Sanjiv Lal believes that even with AI making significant inroads into business processes, ultimately, it will be people who will have to execute plans and implement operations. More importantly, we are decades away from fully automated factory floors where everything can be controlled remotely.
• In India, growth can only come significantly from small and medium enterprises, which form the broad base of the economic pyramid. The thrust of economic imperatives must be at a more pragmatic people-based approach rather than at full automation. Data and analytics can be used effectively to improve business functions, but people will remain at the heart of business activity.

Run time – 00:40:35 mins.