Does Management Matter? — India's Tarapur-Umbergaon Textile Management Experiment

Modern manufacturing plants in developing countries often operate well below the management-quality frontier seen in the United States, Europe and Japan, yet informational barriers rather than cost prevented most firms from adopting well-known practices.
A joint Stanford Graduate School of Business and World Bank research team partnered with global consulting firm Accenture to provide five months of free, structured management consulting — covering quality control, inventory management and human-resources practices — to a randomly selected group of plants among 17 textile firms operating 28 plants in the Tarapur-Umbergaon textile belt near Mumbai, comparing them to a control group that received no consulting.
Treated plants raised average productivity by 11% within the first year through better quality, efficiency and reduced inventory, adopted more decentralised decision-making, and were more likely to open additional production plants within three years — evidence that upgrading management practices, not just machinery, can durably shift firm performance.
The intervention was a one-off, heavily subsidised research trial costing roughly $1.3 million for a small sample of firms, with no institutional mechanism identified to keep delivering similar consulting once the study ended, so its lessons about which practices matter have spread more widely than the delivery model itself.

Read the full analysis: https://worldmanagementsurvey.org/wp-content/images/2010/09/Does-Management-Matter-Evidence-from-India-Bloom-Eifert-Mahajan-McKenzie-and-Roberts.pdf