Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur successfully hosted the fourth edition of its SCM Summit’17- IIMU’s Supply Chain Management Conclave, on February 5th, 2017 at Balicha, Udaipur.

This annual event is a platform where global leaders share their experience and views on the latest trends and issues in the field of Operations and Supply Chain Management and thus provide valuable insights to students and industrialists from Udaipur. The theme of the summit was “Reinventing Supply Chain through Technology.”

The summit is organized by SKEIN, the Supply Chain and Operations Club of IIM Udaipur with State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur (SBBJ) as the associate sponsor.

A case study and article writing competitions were being held as a precursor to the event, with teams from the best B-schools across the country participating in numbers.

The event flagged off with an address by Professor Subhamoy Ganguly of IIM Udaipur. He welcomed the eminent speakers of the Summit and spoke about the vision of the institute and its emphasis on research. He also spoke about the Post Graduate Program in Management for Executives (PGPX) of IIMU, which is offered in full partnership with the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University in the United States and has intensive specialization in Global Supply Chain Management.

The first speaker of the day was Murugan Pugalenthi, Director – Global Planning Excellence, Johnson & Johnson Consumer. He focused on various concepts like Internet of things, Cloud services, analytics, etc. and how they affect the supply chain. He also related to Demonetization as a classic case of supply chain management. The main highlight of his talk was how analytics is a game changer in today’s era of technological disruptions. The second speaker of the day was Soumyakant Dwivedy, Head- Supply Chain, Becton Dickinson. His address focused on the need for businesses to forecast correctly and its positive impact on environment and profits. The next speaker was Suket Singhal, Country Head (UK), Secure Meters. He spoke about the importance of producing superior quality products for companies and touched a variety of topics like automation, process optimization. He also mentioned of Jugaad as an Indian concept and various benefits and downsides it brings along. The penultimate speaker of the day was Ramki Ramakrishnan, Chief Commercial Officer – Hindustan Zinc Limited. He gave an intriguing synopsis for the key drivers of supply chain and their pursuit of four zeroes, zero non-compliance, zero defects, zero broken promises and zero waste. The final speaker of the day was Prashant Saran, Supply Chain Head, Amazon. He shed light on recent supply chain trends like Augmented Reality, Agile Supply Chain, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Technology, Cloud Computing, etc. He also emphasized on the importance of predictive technology to provide customers with exactly what they want.

The event also marked the release of Annual SCM Magazine – OpsSamhita by the eminent speakers and Professor Janat Shah, Director, IIM Udaipur.

The magazine launch was followed by a panel discussion on the same theme. The panel mentioned how the strategy of supply chain has to evolve with various disruptions like floods, demonetization etc. The panel discussed in detail the importance of resilience and efficiency for organizations and how by contingency planning, both can be achieved at the same time. The panel next discussed the differences between a hyper local delivery model and an e-commerce model on various parameters like convenience and warehousing. The panel also mentioned how supply chain models are moving towards being demand driven. The discussion then evolved towards the importance of forecasting in supply chain and the panel emphasized that a significant amount of consumer experience and other intelligence measures are required to build a reliable forecasting model. The discussion was followed by an interactive Question and Answer session with the audience.

The panel appreciated the organizing committee for their efforts and the summit concluded with the felicitation of speakers and a vote of thanks. The Supply Chain Summit’17 was an insightful event and ended as a resounding success, presenting all the attendees with interesting viewpoints about the impact of technology on the supply chain.