This was the opinion expressed by Cromption Greaves managing director KK Nohria at a seminar "Customer-focussed materials management" organised by the Indian Institute of Materials Management on the occasion of its 21st national convention.

He observed that the aggregate buying power of multinationals posed a serious challenge for domestic companies. "The enormous buying power of MNCs posed a far bigger challenge to local players than technology," Nohria said.

Local firms, Nohria said, will need far greater innovation in the form of aggregating demand to fight the might of transnational corporations, which also reaps large-scale advantages from global sourcing.

But technology has its role, as president of Tata-IBM Mukesh Aghi said. "Internet banking, shows our research, costs only eight cents pertransaction, against a dollar and eight cents per deal in traditional physical banking," he said. The physical structure of banking will become obsolete in a decade, Aghi said.

Larsen & Toubro CEO-and-managing director SD Kulkarni highlighted that successful implementation of corporate vision can only be achieved through greater participation and sharing, and not if the vision is imposed by the top management.

"We have seen from our own experience that a shared vision can become much more effective as it confers a sense of ownership to employees," Kulkarni said.

The process of liberalisation, he said, has put the onus on companies to incorporate sweeping changes with a special focus on consumer. "Focus on customer orientation calls for a complete change in attitude and mindset, and does not happen overnight. Customer-driven changes can only be achieved through a cultural change within the organisation," Kulkarni said.

To explain his point, Kulkarni cited his experience at L&T which organiseddraft-vision workshops to arrive at its corporate vision, which stresses on the need for efficient services. "In service lies success," reads the company's motto.

The company, Kulkarni said, gained considerably from its association with world leaders like Caterpillar, which imbibed the philosophy to be service oriented. Each department in a company, he said, has a customer and the ultimate customer can be served only if all intermediate customers are serviced properly.

Francis J Pinto of Piramal Enterprises said that in this information age the scope for customer interraction has increased manifold, and companies today are more equipped to serve the consumer better.

He cited the example of group company Gujarat Glass where a crucial turnaround was achieved over a short time span through greater emphasis on reduction of complaints and quality. "The emphasis on quality has to encompass each and every department, thus laying the emphasis from a department to a process," he said.

"Blocks at thedepartmental level are the problems of the old paradigm and the object will be to break these barriers," Pinto felt.