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Showing posts from 2016

Introduction to Ford Global Data Insights and Analytics - Dr Anil Maddulapalli, GM, Ford Global

We at MBA, IIT Kanpur were lucky to host Dr. Anil Maddulapalli, General Manager, Ford Global, Data Insights and Analytics team, Chennai for a small session on ‘Introduction to Ford Global Data Insights and Analytics’. Dr. Anil talked about various areas where analytics is being used by Ford to improve efficiency across the value chain including processes ranging from inbound logistics to after sales services, thereby enhancing overall customer experience. He started with Analysis of Supplier footprint and went on to discuss the applications of analytics in financial risk assessment (Ford Credit and Enterprise Risk), Customer Analysis – for streamlining the customer demands and market supplies, Advanced Operational Analysis – for sustainability and autonomous vehicle research, Smart Mobility Analysis – for enabling connectivity and mobile solutions etc. After sharing with us the work done at Ford on analytics he opened the session for discussions and solved the queries of studen

Tips from Top- "Recent trends, Opportunities & Management of human capital in Retail businesses in India." Mr Naveen Prakash, AGM- Corporate Talent Acquisition, Spencer's Retail

Mr Naveen Prakash, AGM, Corporate Talent Acquisition at one of India’s largest retail chain – Spencer’s Retail, visited the IME department for a talk on Recent Trends and Opportunities in the Management of Retail Businesses in India. Mr Prakash started the talk with an introduction to the retail market in India. With a total size of USD 530 billion, 47% of the market is urban, out of which 31% is modernized, while only 3% is modernized in rural India. The potential is to grow to USD 800 billion by 2017, with an even split between urban and rural areas and three fold growth of modern retail in rural areas. This is the kind of potential the modern retail business holds in India. Also apparel, furniture, jewelry and medicine have been the fastest growing sectors in retail. Within the retail business, Mr Prakash told the students that it is the repeat customers who actually drive the revenues, and the aim of Spencer’s is to focus on this segment. The driving idea behind the firm’

Tips from Top - "Management of agro business and key challanges faced" by Mr Mihir Mohanta, GM, Mother Dairy, Fruits and Vegetables division

Tips from Top organised a seminar by Mr. Mihir Mohanta, GM, Mother Dairy, Fruits and Vegetables Division. The Topic of the seminar was “Management of Agro Businesses in India – A Key Perspective”. Mr. Mohanta started the seminar giving a brief about challenges faced in supply chain management during planning, costing, implementing, physical movement of goods from one place to another, etc. This was cemented through an example of horticulture train, an endeavour by the Government of India. The train that was considered to be a boon for transportation of food and vegetables was marred by lack of planning, ignorance in demand estimation, and inconvenience in loading on part of farmers. Further talking about the F&V industry, Mr. Mohanta briefed us that although footfall of customers is soaring in this sector, but the risk to return ratio is very low. Reasons being fruits and vegetables are perishable items, have price volatility, and have uncertain demand. Also the supply chai

Tips from Top - Emerging trends and advancements in the healthcare industry, Mr Biten Kathrani, Director, R&D, Boston Scientific

Mr Biten Kishore Kathrani, Director, R&D department for Asia, Middle East and Africa (AME A) at Boston Scientific, visited IME department for a talk on “Emerging trends and advancements in the healthcare industry.” The session turned out to be extremely insightful and the audience got a lot of valuable inputs about the field of healthcare as well as the nuances of how business is done in the industry, the opportunities and the challenges that were pertinent in the industry. Mr Kathrani began the seminar with an introduction of Boston Scientific as a company, its core values and the massive range of medical technologies that it offered. He discussed about the Indian office of Boston Scientific, its full-fledged facility with R&D along with an Advanced Science institute for surgeons training on the cutting edge technology. There was also a brief discussion on the changing nature of healthcare industry from being a patient centric model to a transaction centric model, and

"People: Plug and Play?" - An article by Saikat Chatterjee (Student 2015-17 Batch)

We often talk about Motivation, Engagement, Stress and Conflict Management. These are trending issues in HR today and if we look closely most of them have a negative origin. People are frustrated at work, switching jobs, actively disengaged, not motivated, not satisfied, highly stressed and the list continues. But why? Is it a new trend in the global workforce or is it something else? Is it really an individual issue or it has its root somewhere else? Why we don't look at the human inventory management practices at organizational,social and national level and critically analyze if the problem is with the parts or its usage? People are more flexible to fit in situations compared to assembly hardware but how far? Can our education system and training workshops really convert iron ores to pure gold? It is time to think about it. We talk about stepping outside of comfort zone and taking up new challenges. But we often ignore the fact that the motivation to take up new challen

Prabandhan (Pragyan) - Analytics in todays world, Ms Sridevi Vadapalli, Senior Practice Lead, Infosys

Pragyan- the guest lecture series of the IME Department, IIT Kanpur, organised under the umbrella of Prabandhan’16, witnessed an array of informative seminars delivered by some of the greatest personalities from all over India. One of the guest lectures on ‘Analytics in today’s world’ was delivered by Ms. Sridevi Vadapalli, an M.Sc in Statistics from the University of Hyderabad and having around 15 years of experience in analytics across industries like BFSI, Retail / CPG and manufacturing. Her experience includes indulgence in industries like Text mining, Market basket analysis, Cross sell, Upsell, Churn model, Web analytics etc. She presently heads customer and marketing analytics and operational analytics for FSI clients. Ms. Sridevi commenced the lecture by explaining the importance of historical data via a real life example. Our present-day decisions become biased based on the already existing data with us. All in all, analytics is about analyzing the historical data, find

Prabandhan - 2016 ('Pragyan') - 'Trends in Private Wealth Management - Banking' by Mr. Anshul Garg (Director and V.P., Centrum Capital)

Mr. Anshul Garg, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur (MBA batch of 2005-07), currently the Director and V.P. at Centrum Capital Ltd, delivered a seminar on Banking and Finance as a part of ‘Pragyan’ during 'Prabandhan - 2016' . The following are the excerpts from this interactive session. The discussion spanned across banking scenario in India, technology in banking and future scope in finance. As told by him, the motivation behind a career in banking is the fact that presently out of $5600 billion wealth in India; only $250 billion is actually in investment which he told implied a huge scope for wealth management and investment. However, building up mathematical and quantitative skills remains vital to work in this area. He further threw some light on the tasks of wealth managers. One of the key tasks included assessing the product mix of companies and striking an ideal balance. He also explained some of the risks involved in working in the niche banking roles by providing the

Prabandhan (Pragyan) - Start ups and Digital Marketing by Mr Sheraz Saeed(Cofounder, Websters)

Prabandhan 2016 organized Pragyan, the guest lecture series of IME Department, IIT Kanpur. The series was kick-started by Mr. Sheraz Saeed, Founder of Websters. Websters is a Dubai based social media company started in 2011 and specialized in web designing and digital marketing. It is a part of SoftAge Information Technology Ltd. Mr. Saeed gave a seminar on “Start ups and Digital Marketing”. Giving a brief overview about himself Mr. Saeed mentioned how during his final year at BITS Pilani, Dubai campus he saw a requirement for web services in the Dubai market and from initially beginning as a freelancer he founded Websters, which offers a range of dedicated social media services along with other digital assistance in web development, app development, social media management, analytics, digital marketing etc. Mr Saeed engaged the audience by probing about some start-up ideas. To the passionate budding entrepreneurs who had such ideas and the audience in general, he gave an

Prabandhan(Pragyan) - A talk by Mr Sourav Shah, Head Digital Marketing & CRM, Jubilant food works

The second day of Prabandhan witnessed a seminar by Mr. Sourav Shah (Head Digital Marketing and CRM,  Jubilant Foodworks) as part of the guest lecture series Pragyan. The prime emphasis was upon Digital Marketing- A key perspective and future. The seminar began with some interesting and insightful discussion on the Digital adoption rate vis a vis the traditional media like TV, print media, telephone etc and it was concluded that digital media had seen a far greater adoption rate than any other. Sir strongly emphasized that going digital was the way to go for present and future marketers and it would be the most crucial medium and competition platform for business. Being innovative and proactive in the digital space would be quintessential for competitive advantage very soon if not already. Sir bolstered this argument with several examples such as Whats-app, Facebook, smartphones etc each of which had offered unique value propositions and were being adopted at a r

Pragyan - Prabandhan 2016: Talk on “Digital Marketing and Disruption in Finance” by Mr Manish Agarwal, Senior Vice President – Digital marketing & Innovation, Kotak Mahindra Bank

‘Prabandhan – 2016’ presents ‘Pragyan’, the guest lecture series of IME department, IIT Kanpur. The second seminar of the series by Mr Manish Agarwal, Senior Vice President – Digital marketing & Innovation, Kotak Mahindra Bank, focused on “Digital Marketing and Disruption in Finance”. In an enlightening seminar, he talked about the changing trend in marketing from traditional to the digital marketing where technology plays the pivotal role. He enlisted three critical dimensions which are driving this paradigm shift, namely: Hyper Adoption, Digital Disruption and Customer Experience. These three dimensions are changing the entire marketing arena which has now become an end to end process. To drive the point home, sir gave the example of Tesla motors, which launched a new model in April 2016 and within 36 hours they received about 400 thousand bookings even before its industrial production had begun. This indicated the power of digital marketing. He purported that the digita

Tips from Top - Consulting as Career, A talk by Mr Amit Singh (Director, PwC) & Ms Shalina Bhatia (Associate Director, PwC)

Everyone has an idea about the world of consulting but only few are aware of what it actually is. To allay our doubts and provide a glimpse into it we had Mr. Amit Singh (Director, PwC) and Ms. Shalina Bhaita (Associate Director, PwC), who visited our campus for a session on Consulting and consulting to government bodies in particular.  Initially Mr. Amit gave us a brief introduction about PwC, its working and about the Smart city Project of Government of India to which he is closely associated.  During his talk Mr. Singh emphasized on the skill set required for a consultant. The first among them was mentioned as the ability to learn and unlearn quickly. And for that one must read to stay relevant and contextual.  Further he mentioned how this must be complemented with peer to peer learning, with emphasis on learning not just from acquaintances but also from surroundings. Another prerequisite for a consultant was mentioned by Mr. Singh as building a good network of people with fo

Tips from Top - Seminar on Advanced Analytics by Mr Siddhartha Roy(GM Advanced Analytics & Cognitive Solutions, IBM)

The morning of 24th September started with a thought provoking session, when Mr. Siddhartha Roy, General Manager, Advanced Analytics & Cognitive Solutions at IBM, visited IME Department of IIT Kanpur for a session on Advanced Analytics, Big Data and recent trends. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Mr. Roy started  by defining consulting as a guiding force for thinking right  in order to bring out best solution for a set of defined problems. Talking about ‘data’, he said it has both quantitative and qualitative parts, and knowing how both of these match is the key to understanding it. Mr. Roy mentioned how every problem or case starts as a nebulous one. To  emphasis  his point and to impart an approach to students for tackling real life business problems, he carried out an interesting activity by dividing the students into groups and presenting them with a problem faced by a certain company having dipping market share of its products. With the required focus on the market metrics used

Tips from Top: Corporate roles and career in consulting - a key perspective, Mr Himanshu Verma (Lead HR, IT Consulting Services, KPMG)

“How to become a ‘leader- across all levels’? How to generate confidence for providing solutions to a myriad of problems? And not only that, how does one proactively simulate problems, solving them even before they occur, and step ahead in the learning curve?” These are some of the intriguing questions that were raised and were very efficiently answered today, by a very young and dynamic persona; Mr. Himanshu Verma (Lead HR, IT Consulting Services, KPMG) when he delivered an enlightening seminar on ‘Corporate roles and career in consulting, a key perspective’ while addressing an audience of MBA students at IIT Kanpur. Mr. Verma began by defining the two terms: ‘consulting’ and ‘consultant’. He stated that consulting can be understood as a process of not only giving solutions but also creating (simulating) problems proactively, in order to get efficient solutions beforehand. According to sir, a ‘consultant’ is not just a job role; it’s a breed of people with relevant domain know

Tips from Top: Business Intelligence and Analytics, Mr Manish Menon (Manager, Business Technology, ZS Associates)

Mr. Manish Menon, Business Technology Manager at ZS Associates, visited IIT Kanpur campus on 11 th  September. The topic of the seminar was Business Intelligence and Analytics. The seminar began with how analytics affects every walk of our life: from taxi aggregating service  Ola , e-commerce giant  Amazon , superstores like  Walmart , to healthcare services such as  Apple Health Kit . Mr. Menon elaborated on the shifting focus of analytics over the years from “what to do with data and where to get the data from?” to “how impactful can we make it?” Mr. Menon talked about the evolution of analytics from centralised passive reporting, periodic monitoring and data warehouse to decentralization, active experimentation, advanced use cases and data lakes. He also emphasized on a pragmatic saying – “ fail fast  so as to recover quickly, learn the lesson, and move on to other projects”. Mr. Menon discussed how the growing trend of cloud computing and storage of huge quantities of d

Tips from Top - Big Data Analytics, Mr. Sanjay Sharma (MD, Accenture; Data Science Lead)

The fundamental requirement in corporate is not only about survival but about thriving in chaos. Thriving in chaos and not letting oneself be unnerved leads to growth. Targeting the sunrise opportunities, learning continuously and evolving perpetually were some of the insightful learnings from Mr. Sanjay Sharma (Managing Director, Accenture; Data Science Lead – India), who was at IIT Kanpur, MBA for a seminar on “Big Data Analytics”. Mr. Sharma simplified the definition of Big Data and gave a generic definition for us to understand. According to him, Big Data is collection of unstructured data to derive useful information out of it for making decisions. According to him the huge amount of data available has generated the need for Big Data Architecture. For example Banks need to maintain a lot of data due to rules, regulations and requirement of customers. A lot of querying on this data is necessary to generate information out of it. This is where cloud computing and distri

Tips from Top, Digital Marketing – A Key Perspective by Mr Vikash Kumar and Mr. Mohit Goel (Trident Ltd)

Mr Vikash Kumar, Chief Digital Officer at Trident Group India Ltd, visited the IME department at IIT Kanpur along with his colleague Mr Mohit Goel, GM at Digital Trident, on the 3 rd of September, 2016. Talking about the changing scenario of digital marketing and the challenges and opportunities that it poses for today’s marketing managers, he shared his insights as the Chief Digital Officer of the textile giant Trident India Ltd, about the marketing and branding strategies being followed in the current scenario. Mr Kumar stressed upon keeping the session as informal and interactive as possible, making it into a dialogue rather than a one-way lecture. He started with defining digital marketing as a medium that provides two way flow of information or communication on world wide web. He emphasized on how the rapidly changing world of digital marketing has made textbook knowledge insufficient, and further emphasized the importance of learning on the job, staying unique, a

A talk by Mr. Vikram Ahuja, C.T.O. of ‘Vlink’

“A leader not just shows the way, he walks with you on that path”- Mr. Vikram Ahuja, C.T.O. of ‘Vlink’, shared these immortal words whilst his candid session with the students of MBA IIT Kanpur. Sir gave the perfect example of Elon musk to drive the point home. World famous personality, Musk with his futuristic and altruistic vision has raised the bar for innovation. The solar city venture by Musk, aims at scaling up the entire level of civilization of our planet! Mr. Ahuja led us through his journey after leaving the portals of IIT Kanpur, his experience at his family owned business from where he moved to Boston to work with companies in the domain of healthcare, retail and artificial intelligence to his post Harvard experiences in start-ups, as an angel investor and as a business strategist. He added in particular how the case study method deployed at the IME department was helpful to him at Harvard where the same methodology is applied, and how case studies bring students clos

Tips from Top by Mr. Jagadeesh Kunchey (ITC) - FMCG Supply Chain Management - A Key Perspective

Apt to the theme, the seminar started with defining Supply Chain  Management. In the words of Mr. Jagadeesh Kunchey, National Supply Chain  Head of ITC - “Supply Chain is the flow of material, money and  information; and Supply Chain Management strives to stream line the flow, in order to ensure availability of right things at right place, in an optimized manner.” The first slide of his presentation rightly summed it up as “The enabler of business growth”.  There after a brief overview was given about the FMCG industry in India, which stands at around 170,000 crore today, growing rapidly at a CAGR of 17% over last 5 fiscals. Following pie chart was presented, depicting various sectors of the FMCG industry in India as on date and as a matter of fact, ITC has presence in almost every sector! Mr. Kunchey said that being one of the youngest and most populous countries in the world makes India one of the most attractive destinations for many companies. In terms of the

Tips from Top by Mr Animesh Kumar(Cisco) - Corporate Strategy, Acquisitions, & Strategic Ecosystem

On the 21 st of August, Mr Animesh Kumar, HR Business Partner and ER Manager of Cisco Systems India, visited IIT Kanpur and gave a talk on corporate strategy and acquisitions, and the strategic ecosystem with focus on Cisco India. The session started on a lighter note, with an easy demeanor ,and this was maintained throughout. Mr Kumar talked about the vision, goal and strategy of Cisco and how it is implemented constantly despite the changes that the company has gone through over a span of around 30 years of its existence. Showing some of the current trends and future projections in the networking industry, we got a brief idea about how cloud computing has currently become the most prevalent technology, and about the shift towards the Internet of Things (IoT) concept, which is known as the Internet of Everything (IoE) in Cisco. It is a concept of connecting “people, programs, data and things”, wherein everything around you will be connected via wireless networks and can make

Tips from Top by Mr Sudhakar Mishra(Philips) - Product Management with Focus on Healthcare Sector-

The session was divided into two parts. The first was about Mr Mishra’s  journey after MBA from IIT Kanpur. The second focused on various nuances about the healthcare industry, market position of Philips, and the role Product Manager. Mr. Mishra shared his experiences and key learning in the corporate world- working with a start-up, Entrepreneurial experience and journey with Phillips. He explained the importance of mentor, agility in start-up, learning as a key factor for growth and evaluating stock option opportunity while working with a start-up. He further moved to his own entrepreneurial journey with the alums of IIT Delhi and IIT Roorkee in health care sector. The key learning which he shared from this experience included working with managers’ vs working with entrepreneurs, tapping market opportunity, importance of constant innovation and improvement, recruitment as per need, hindrance to decision making due to too many partners, equality among partners, etc.  Mr Mishra

The Dawn of A New Beginning - MBA Batch 2016-18

Enthusiasm, zeal, hopes, ambitions resonate high in the spirits of the new batch of IME department, IIT Kanpur, which is en route a new journey. A new journey brings along with it a set of new experiences. And the journey at IIT Kanpur has been no different. From setting up our tiny rooms (which ultimately turn into a hotchpotch clutter), to detouring the huge campus (IIT Kanpur is spread in 1050 acres of land), owning the most prized vehicle on campus – a cycle, and the sight of National bird of IIT Kanpur- peacock, the initial days were a vacation. However the fun was yet to start. And how does this fun kick start- the fun activities and assignments (believe me how much you tend to hate them; they are indeed fun to do). It was an amazing experience with the ad making assignment- gathering at CCD for the subsided Devil’s Own on pretext of brainstorming creative ideas, the retakes and bloopers and then the final product-the ad. All the fun activities are scheduled at 11. Don’t