IIT Kanpur MBA Blog

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 ...