How has this impacted new product development and product innovations?
New product development and innovations are a key area in achieving business excellence through technological leadership. We have been able to reduce the developmental lead times to 25 per cent of what we started with six years back and have deployed computer-aided simulation for developing new products. We have made rapid strides in doing things right the first time, every time by reducing the number of trials and iterations. We are increasingly getting involved with product design through collaborative efforts with our customers. Today, new products contribute to 35 per cent of our sales, up from 12 per cent earlier. How do you correlate creating value for customers to these efforts? Customer satisfaction is, of course, the objective of TQM. We have made extensive improvements in the supply chain by taking on additional responsibilities and integrated ourselves much better with the customer. We have added eight warehouses all over the world and posted customer services managers in Eu
