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with the help of strategic management. Thus the employees can judge the impact of such
changes on their own job and can effectively face the changes. The managers and employees
must do appropriate things in appropriate manner. They need to be both effective as well as
efficient.
One of the major role of strategic management is to incorporate various functional areas of
the organization completely, as well as, to ensure these functional areas harmonize and get
together well. Another role of strategic management is to keep a continuous eye on the goals
and objectives of the organization.
factors that are the root of present strategies, measuring performance, and taking
remedial / corrective actions. Evaluation makes sure that the organizational strategy as
well as its implementation meets the organizational objectives.
These components are steps that are carried, in chronological order, when creating a new
strategic management plan. Present businesses that have already created a strategic
management plan will revert to these steps as per the situations requirement, so as to make
essential changes.
History
Mahindra & Mahindra was established on October 2, 1945 when K.C. Mahindra visited the United States
of America as Chairman of the India Supply Mission. He met Barney Roos, inventor of the rugged
'general purpose vehicle' or Jeep and had a flash of inspiration: wouldn't a vehicle that had proved its
invincibility on the battlefields of World War II be ideal for India's rugged terrain and its kutcha rural
roads. Swift action followed thought. The Mahindra brothers joined hands with a distinguished gentleman
called Ghulam Mohammed. And, Mahindra & Mohammed was set up as a franchise for assembling jeeps
from Willys, USA.
Two years later, India became an independent nation and Mahindra & Mohammed changed its name to
Mahindra & Mahindra. Ghulam Mohammed migrated to Pakistan postpartition and became the first
Finance Minister of Pakistan.
Mahindra & Mahindra is the only Indian company among the top three tractor manufacturers in the
world. The Group has a leading presence in key sectors of the Indian economy. The Group employs over
50,000 people and has several stateoftheart facilities in India and overseas.
Mahindra & Mahindra has comprehensive manufacturing facilities with high level of vertical integration.
Catering to the Sector's diverse customer base spanning rural and semi urban customers, defence
requirements and luxurious urban utility vehicles or SUVs. These manufacturing plants keep abreast with
the latest technology to meet the growing market expectations. These manufacturing facilities have some
of the best technologies and equipment in India and provide for a very challenging and satisfying work
environment. Its plants in Mumbai and Nasik manufacture multiutility vehicles and engines are
produced at the Igatpuri plant. Utility Vehicles, Light commercial vehicles and 3 wheelers are
manufactured at the Zaheerabad plant in Andhra Pradesh and threewheelers at the Haridwar plant.
Farm equipment
M&M's farm equipment segment has presence in six continents and has a worldwide network of 800
dealers .Its total combined production capacity is 1,50,000 tractors a year from countries like India, USA,
China and Australia. The company is also into agri business.
Trade, Retail & Finance
Mahindras Intertrade Division provides steel & steel related services. It offers steel raw materials,
metals, Ferro alloys, etc. It also processes Cold Rolled Grain Oriented (CRGO) and Cold Rolled Non
Grain Oriented (CRNGO) steels that are required for transformers & compressors. Mahindra Retails is
into distribution business and has tie up with big names like Lego, Disney, Mattel and others. Mahindra
Finance is into financing of tractors and other vehicles and is also into Insurance broking.
Infrastructure
M&M has also entered Infrastructure development that operates in real estates, SEZs, hospitality,
project engineering and design. Under this it has created Mahindra Holiday & Resorts, Mahindra
Lifespaces & Mahindra World City.
Information Technology
Tech Mahindra provides solutions & services to telecommunication majors namely Alcatel, AT&T, BT,
Convergys, Ericsson and O2, among others. It is also into business process and technology consulting
services through Bristle.
Systech
It is into supply of automotive components. It produces forged and forged / machined components,
gears and composites.
Speciality Business
Under this division it has companies like Mahindra Defence, engaged in manufacturing defence
related vehicles & Mahindra Ashtech.
Group chairman Anand Mahindra says in India every company should seed internal disruptors to view the
same issue with different perspective. One of the internal disruptors that Mahindra has is the "Shadow
Board." All Mahindra group companies are required to form a Shadow Board made up of people under 35
years of age, who meet every quarter and behave as if they were the board of Mahindra and discuss what
they would be doing differently.
"One of the classic examples of their performance I give is, when we were not bidding for Punjab
Tractors at one stage, at our annual conference, during these Shadow Board presentations, one of them
did a very interesting skit. They pretended that they were from a competitor, and they play-acted as if they
had bought over Punjab Tractors. They demonstrated that if they bought it and Mahindra didn't, what
would happen in the market," Mahindra said in an earlier interview.
"At that time, we had been looking at IRRs (Internal Rate of Return), our walkaway price, our strategic
synergy value etc. I came away frightened out of my mind. I have no doubt in admitting that all of us
there who eventually bought Punjab Tractors were affected by that, because a bunch of people took time
out to think about what would happen. That forced us to think differently. Punjab Tractors today is among
our most successful acquisitions," he says.
On Reva, Mahindra says electric cars are an innovation that can disrupt the automobile sector. "When the
future comes, it doesn't come with a very long overture. It comes with the curtain just about rising or
dropping. Today, if someone asks whether Tesla (a US-based electric car maker) will disrupt the
automotive business in India, I'll answer, "Mahindra won't be worried!"
department/unit head, managerial and operational in 2003. This organisational restructuring based on
business needs was later extended to smaller businesses in the group. For example, Mahindra Engineering
services have recently been established by combining key engineering and design resources from the
Tractors and Automotive division. Given the numbers involved the challenge was to manage
expectations, feeling of threat that is intrinsic to such an exercise, communications and counselling. HR
function played an important role as it led the exercise with co-opera/tion from all line managers,
explained Mr Choudhari.
Managing Key Resource Requirements
The reassessment of organisational requirements brought in gaps in terms of management resources.
While many of the roles were filled through internal promotions and parallel moves, certain gaps like
inability of the senior management to fit in the role due to the rapidly changing business environment
emerged. Therefore the company began inducting senior management resources from diverse companies
like Xerox, Marico, Enron, Hindustan lever Ltd as well as from engineering, tractor and automobile
sectors. This enabled the company to induct a talent pool with rich background which was suitable to the
changing business requirements of the group.
Also in order to bring in young talent keeping in mind the long term objectives, the group has started a
formal Management Trainee Scheme through campus recruitments. The move threw up an interesting
observation, that of acceptability of young blood working initially at operational level jobs with older
experienced people. To avoid the feeling of animosity and in order to build camaraderie, the group has put
in place a Mentoring system, where each management trainee has a senior executive who plays the role of
mentor. The mentor reviews the progress made by the trainee every two-three months and provides
guidance and counselling if the need so arises. Further in order to encourage existing management
resources to seek internal opportunities beyond their immediate business group, a formal internal
advertisement has been established which puts up vacancies on the Mahindra intranet.
Mr Seqeuira explained that a three tier approach is in place to develop the capabilities of the management.
The management developments have been structured to meet the needs at each responsibility band of
management, said Mr Seqeuira. So, if the emphasis in the top management is on strategy, leadership and
change, for the strategic and executive management band, the focus is on team building, people skills,
understanding and managing technology and financial and marketing orientation. Similarly for
department and unit head management band, the emphasis is on general management skills, managerial
and personal effectiveness and multi-functional understanding.
Apart from the in house management development programme, the group also utilises selective outside
programmes for high potential managers. These include management programmes run by Harvard
Business School, London Business School and India School of Business - Hyderabad. The idea is to take
the management development programme to the lowest level of the hierarchy to bring out the leadership
potential, which is extremely crucial for the companys growth as it moves ahead, said Mr Seqeuira.
Managing Succession
A key HR function at Mahindra group is the career and succession planning. The objective of this
function is to chart out a detailed career path of each individual at the senior most levels. The career path
taps both the strengths and weaknesses and aspiration of each individual executive.
The detailed career planning also leads to identification of incumbents as successor to a specific
responsibility.
What we try to do, through our succession planning is the early identification of potential successors and
both formally and informally, begin to provide expanded responsibilities so that there is an on-the-job
development of a larger perspective and understanding, elaborated Mr Choudhari.
Server virtualization came in as an option at this time, since Mahindra & Mahindra wanted to take the
green route for its new data centre.
Work on M&M's data centre started in late 2007. The new data centre was complete in three months, and
it went live in March 2008.
Selection criteria
Once server virtualization was selected as the new data centres core driver, Mahindra & Mahindra's
Centre of Excellence evaluated various options. Server virtualization platforms such as Xen, Microsoft
Hyper-V and VMware were evaluated, before the team zeroed in on VMware.
According to Mahajan, VMware was selected since it is a very robust solution and has a good
management console. "VMware was expensive compared to Xen, which is freeware and offers an open
platform. However, we found VMware to be a very robust platform." Yet another factor that influenced
the choice was the simplicity of moving physical servers to VMware.
The new data centre went live in March 2008, with VMware as the server virtualization platform. "We
were able to create service-oriented infrastructure using VMware as an underlying layer for virtualization.
Then we redeployed various applications which were earlier distributed across numerous hardware
platforms on to a smaller subset of scalable hardware," says Prasad Patil, the manager of corporate IT at
Mahindra & Mahindra. Avnet Technology Solutions assisted with the implementation.
Virtualization power
Mahindra & Mahindra's server infrastructure currently has 80 virtual machines implemented on eight
physical servers, in addition to various standalone servers. These eight physical servers include a disaster
recovery (DR) server.
Three different VMware setups are in use at Mahindra & Mahindra. The first VMware setup consists of
12 SAP 4.6B servers running on a single enterprise-class server attached to a disk enclosure. Group
websites that were earlier hosted at Reliance Data Centre now run on seven virtual machines as part of the
second setup.
Mahindra & Mahindra has a server replacement cycle of four to five years. Since the rollout of server
virtualization, it has been able to redeploy obsolete physical servers on virtual machines on the third
VMware setup. These three virtualized server setups are managed through a single console provided by
VMware Control Centre.
Challenges
When Mahindra & Mahindra started its server virtualization journey two years back, the team faced
challenges such as application conflicts. The most common setbacks on this front were backup issues.
According to Patil, these have been solved by using two backup methodologies. The first approach uses
EMC Corp.'s Legato clients on the virtual machines as a backup solution. Mahindra & Mahindra also uses
EMC's Avamar, an appliance-based backup device that completely backs up the virtual machines.
Another major challenge for Mahindra & Mahindra was the use of databases on VMware. This challenge
is more from a licensing perspective than a technical perspective. "Databases like Oracle do not recognize
a virtual machine as a server. This is a problem since deploying these databases on a virtual machine
increases our costs. So we are consciously not deploying databases on VMware," Mahajan says.
I/O intensive applications have been yet another challenge. Since Mahindra & Mahindra has not yet
virtualized the network layer, all 12 SAP servers share the same I/O. This creates challenges when high
I/O happens on certain applications. VMware's vSphere 4.0 has an integrated vSwitch that solves this
problem, but it has yet to be deployed.
Accruing benefits
Today, Mahindra & Mahindra has been able to set up a high-availability DR infrastructure (local failover
scenario), which has been made possible due to VMware. Tremendous savings have also been accrued in
terms of power and management, as well as optimum server utilization.
"In a standalone server, the CPU utilization is at the most 20 percent. Due to virtualization, the utilization
has gone up to 60 to 70 percent. Now, the physical server count has come down and management is easier
since you are focusing on the solution through a single console. Besides, lesser the number of servers,
lesser is the required power and cooling," Patil says.
The annual management cost (AMC) cost of old hardware has also come down substantially. Earlier, SAP
archival data servers had to be maintained for seven to eight years, escalating the AMC of 13 servers
along with the licenses. This cost gets eliminated when it is put on a single server. In addition, load
balancing is easier now since more resources can be rapidly allocated to the virtual environment.
Looking into the future
Although SAP has been virtualized using local partitioning, Mahindra & Mahindra's IT mission for the
near future is to deploy these applications with the same aggressiveness as VMware. This will maximize
benefits from AIX-based virtualization.
REFRENCES
http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/40-years-ago-and-now-how-m-m-was-driven-toinnovate-114101400010_1.html
http://www.managementstudyguide.com/strategic-management-process.htm
http://www.managementstudyguide.com/strategic-management.htm
http://archive.financialexpress.com/news/strategy-for-overall-overhaul-at-mahindra-ampmahindra/86524/0
http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.in/feature/Mahindra-Mahindras-server-virtualization-success-story