TOCICO

Charath Narasimhan, Nikhil Gilani and Ira Gilani present the measurement system behind Indian Terrain Fashions' turnaround. Indian Terrain is a premium Western menswear brand in India operating across roughly 150-200 exclusive stores, 800-1,000 multi-brand outlets, more than 200 large-format outlets, six or more e-commerce channels and more than 250 cities. After the post-COVID revenue recovery, sales flattened while inventory continued to rise. Some locations had excess stock while others lacked best sellers, managers and franchisees guarded inventory, and the cash squeeze made further growth without additional capital increasingly difficult. TOC education introduced a common management language around Throughput (T), Investment (I) and Operating Expense (OE) and reframed the goal as making more and more money. The central operating measure became I/(T-OE), where lower is better. Rather than asking channels only to grow sales, leaders were asked to improve capital productivity without increasing the inventories and receivables blocked in the system. Each channel was measured against its own prior 13-week moving average instead of being compared with other channels, while teams drilled into underperforming stores, counters, distributors and partners to decide whether to raise Throughput, reduce Investment or reduce channel-specific OE. The measure was made visible through weekly dashboards and streaks, but the more important mechanism was management cadence. For more than 120 weeks, the Managing Director chaired weekly reviews with the senior leadership team covering organization-wide collections, Throughput, gross working capital/Investment, Operating Expense and overdues; each channel was then reviewed individually against its 13-week baseline, with gaps translated into corrective and preventive actions. The approach extended beyond finance into merchandise allocation, replenishment, credit policy, collections and frontline store management. The mindset shift was from chasing scale to building a healthier business. Indian Terrain challenged assumptions about inventory quantity, introduced product-category min-max norms, exited EBO stores and LFO doors that were T-OE negative, enforced distributor credit limits, accelerated returns of unsold merchandise to free credit capacity and increased attention to collections. Leadership, functional teams and store managers were trained together so local decisions could be connected to T, I and OE and evaluated by their effect on the whole system. The reported FY25-to-FY26 results show the combined effect: net sales increased from ₹3,408 million to ₹3,774 million, an increase of ₹366 million; profit before tax improved from a ₹414 million loss to a ₹27 million profit, a ₹441 million improvement; and gross working-capital days fell from 329 to 311, an 18-day reduction. The presenters conclude that revenue growth, profit and cash flow can improve together when the organization manages for system performance rather than local optimization.