Business growth

Usha International (UIL), one of India’s best recognized brands of home appliances, hired us to help management revamp their business model and build out best-in-class practices across its value chain.

But our Advisory business transformation team knew that to transform the 70-year-old behemoth into a modern organization, they needed to build lasting relationships with the UIL team.

So they asked: “Is trust our most important deliverable?”

In order to transform UIL, the Advisory teams in EY member firm offices in Mumbai and Delhi had to earn the trust of the Distributor, CEO and employees of UIL. The EY team worked closely with UIL’s management and employees to help them understand changing market dynamics and co-design their new strategy and process backbone. They also helped bring about a company-wide consensus and enthusiasm to drive the strategy shift.

The success of the three-month pilot program led to a request from the client to reconfigure the approach of each individual business unit. And, the work the EY team did in the distribution arm of UIL’s business had a big impact. UIL had traditionally sold their products to wholesalers, who would then distribute the products to individual retailers in remote areas. EY and the UIL sales team instead went directly to these rural retailers to understand their expectations, constraints and needs, and developed an inexpensive and efficient system to help retail stores get the products that their customers did not have access to before.

The business started to turn the corner as a result of these changes, from a loss-making business to industry-leading growth in recent years.

Not only did the EY team transform UIL’s value chain, they also enabled the path for future profitable growth and built a high level of trust with people at all levels of the company. EY is now part of the CEO’s “think-tank” and he consults them on all critical aspects of the business.

Beyond the numbers, the impact of these changes is visible in the greater reach of Usha’s products, reaching down to small villages that were earlier being accessed through urban wholesalers.