PRABANDHAN – 2015 : The Snap shot
As we witnessed
the beginning of the Fifth Edition of the Annual Management Fest of IIT
Kanpur“Prabandhan’15”, the same vision got reflected in the Welcome speech from
Dr. Rahul Varman, Head of the Department, who emphasized on the futuristic
approach to address the long term objectives and overcome the possible
impediments pertaining to the global Business community. Professor in his
speech highlighted some of the basic problems of industry starting from the
resource crunch to increase in frauds and scams across the globe impacting the
growth and questioning the sustainability of moral and ethical structure
prevailing today. He appealed to the budding managers to come out with their
out-of-the-box ideas and activities so as to play a major role in mitigating
these concerns and answering the long pending questions, where industry is
struggling to find the key. In his speech Professor Varman also mentioned the ever
growing importance of a mutually beneficial industry-academia partnership where
a free sharing of knowledge and experiences will eventually enrich the field of
business management itself. He said that he is hopeful that such platforms will
bring in the best minds across the country together to engage in long term
bonding and create a learning opportunity for all concerned. Finally, he
expressed his sincere thanks to all the guests from the industry and the
participants from the esteemed B-Schools for devoting their valuable time to
attend the conclave.
Digital-marketing, e-commerce, Consultancy,
Analytics and new age marketing strategies
Mr. Ankur Choudhary from Reckitt Benckiser (An
IIT-D grad) shared his views on digital marketing. According to him, the arena
of digital marketing is both complicated and important. Brands are trying to
engage more and more people through digital technology. Number of digital users
is increasing at a very fast pace. From 226.3 million internet users in India
in 2014, the number is expected to reach 411.1 million in 2018; while the
number of smart phone users is expected to reach 279.2 million in 2018 – a
steep jump from 123.3 million users in 2014. Due to this reason, spending on
digital advertisements is increasing and is poised to increase.
According to him, digital marketing companies
need to look at the scenario in a broader aspect. He moved on to explain the
pillars of digital marketing. These are as follows:
1) Search- When consumers are trying to find
details about a particular product, the first step is search engine. To
increase the visibility of product, companies have to make sure that their
information is displayed on the first page of the search results (or within top
few results). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a useful tool to implement
the same.
2) Social- Marketing companies can make use of
social media platforms like Facebook because such platforms know various details
about the users like whether the user is male or female, what interests
him/her, etc.
3) Media- This pillar is the most affected by
technology. From the marketer’s perspective, it is extremely important.
4) Analytics- With analytics, companies can
predict return on investments better.
5) Infrastructure- The websites are becoming more
user friendly. This leads to increase in convenience to users which results in
increase in sales.
6) Content- Now a days, viral videos spread like
wildfire. This is because of the content which connects with the audience and
engages directly with them.
7) CRM- Customer Relationship Management- It is
an approach to manage a company’s interaction with current and future
customers. Digital marketers have found out that email marketing is much more
effective than other means.
8) ORM- Online Reputation Management- In this
fast digital world, companies need to use online means also to maintain their
reputation. Example- Nestle came out with videos supporting it after the ban
incident.
He also shared his thoughts saying that, to
succeed in a digital career, one need to abandon his/her comfort zone,
challenge the existing standard conventions and learn from experiments, among
others. B-School students need to learn continuously to progress in their
careers and understand the overall picture of business.
Mr.Harshavardhan Kathaley - Director,
Enterprise Channels and Distribution Biz. of Juniper Networks, one of the most
ethical companies in the world, with his plethora of knowledge brought laurels
to the management fest.
Juniper products and technology powers 60% of
the world’s Internet transactions, 80%
of smart phone traffic, and enable 6 of the 7 world’s largest stock
exchanges—trading over a billion shares a day. Their customers include the top
130 global service providers, all of the Global Fortune 100, and hundreds of
public sector organizations.
Mr.
Harshavardhan introduced the business enthusiasts with the concepts of B2B
sales and importance of technology and Innovation in increasing the profits of
global as well as local businesses. He also explained the fundamentals as well
as innovations required for ensuring healthy and profitable operations of a
company following B2B business model and the significance of building ethical
service provider-distributor channels for the same.
Following the FMCG & High end technical
service sales and marketing strategy, we had the very charming and new age
entrepreneur Mr. Salil Agarwal. Salil Agarwal, the founder of gopeppers.com
(which he calls as a “need based business”) and was initially associated with
“foodpandanda.com” gave a talk on the emerging trends of e-commerce. He started
with the fact that nowadays, it is more about “e” than about “commerce”. He
gave an extensive talk on e-wallets, business blogging, crowd funding and
social commerce. Apart from this, he shared his experience of starting a
start-up and talked about the various rejections and hindrances he had to face
during this. He motivated the students to believe in their ideas and take the
risks of executing these ideas because he feels “A will to take risks” is the
most important thing required to start a business. He ended the talk by a quote
which has been a firm source of motivation for him , “I believe you have to be
willing to be misunderstood if you are going to innovate.”
Following the
new age concepts of entrepreneur ventures and business practices in day to day requirements
we had Mr. Mukesh Lal, an IIM-C alumni and currently AVP of EXL services
enlightened us on a very different topic "Analytics in Utility
Services". He explained in fine details how analytics is being used and also
the future prospects on gas, electricity and other services industry. This
industry is considered to be a highly competitive and highly regulated market
in US and other such countries. The concept of "Smart Meters" which
could tell consumption after every 30 minutes was discussed in detail.
Analytics is
being used to forecast the growth, plan the transmission and distribution
mechanism and most importantly for breakdown mechanism. Models have also been
created to deal with fraud which is of prime concern to many companies dealing
in utility industry. Mr. Lal also focused on the necessity of prediction and
identification of problem after which only actions could be taken to resolve
issues. Lastly we could just say that the seminar opened our thinking horizon
on the various fields where analytics finds application in the modern and
highly global world.
Next up was consultancy business in real world. Mr. Narendra Sanwane , AVP , Infosys Ltd., the man with immense experience and true knowledge of business dimensions presented the recent happenings and developments in the fields of Information Technology. The IIM-B grad, with sheer experience and jovial thoughts presented some of the key concepts of Cloud computing and its effects, the internet of things and the recent buzz word “Big Data” and its day to day applications.
Through a very fascinating and pleasant way
Mr. Sanwane delivered some of the very interesting facts and figures about
digital economy. He has firm beliefs that cloud computing is going to dominate
the decades to come and that is having enormous pros associated with some
unavoidable cons too. An example of recent incidents at India’s IT capital,
Bangalore has made his seminar a very lively experience to enjoy with rapt
attention. The man with sheer experience and enviable understanding also
presented his thoughts on how social media analytics is going to change the
future world in different ways. This is even helping the very booming brands to
reposition themselves in different market segments altogether.
With that note, he also shared his views on
Infosys and its coming days which is going to establish the firm as carbon
neutral one by the end of 2018 .
Day 2: 27.09.15
"Information
is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine."
The rooms were
full and the stage was set as the day two of Prabandhan’15 began with an
insightful take on the application of analytics in the banking world. The
speaker was Vyom Upadhyay, Head-Business Intelligence ICICI Bank. He began his
interactive session by explaining how traditional data of the customers when
combined with the new social media data results in data explosion. He touched
wide range of topics including but not limited to Risk, Alternate Currencies,
Banking Anywhere, Multi Channel Platforms, Cross Channel Experiences, Changing
face of competition, Traditional BI, CRM and Data Science. The session was
successful in generating curiosity for analytics and data among the students
and as it is said curiosity is the spark behind the spark of every great idea,
we believe that the session lived up even beyond its expectation.
The seminar
second in lead for the second day of Prabandhan was given by Sridevi
Vadapalli, Senior Practice
Lead at Infosys. The gist of the entire seminar was the application of
analytics in wide range of fields which included Retail, Manufacturing,
Insurance and financial services. All the applications usage explanation began
with social media analytics with some of the astonishing facts like 61% of
global internet user’s research products online and that 45% are active
internet users. The seminar came to an end with a beautiful explanation
of customer lifecycle starting with Customer acquisition and moving towards
Customer development and Customer retention.
Mr Saurabh Mittal
, Senior Vice President, Fractal Analytic begin his seminar with some of the
renowned analytics driven companies like Netflix, Amazon and House of Cart. The
fact that analytics and technology are now inextricably linked was beautifully
portrayed by “Google maps” and “Google now” using real time analytics and thus
owing an impeccable amount of data giving it an edge over many companies even
with high end technologies. Example of Uber and Bing not only helped to
decipher the importance of analytics but also attempted to realize the
significance of big data. The seminar was not only an end to an engrossing
session but also an end of Prabandhan 2015. It ended with a quote:
“You don’t have
to build your career for tomorrow
You have to build
for decades after now “
With that note , Prabandhan -2015 ended with
a perfect
closure from Mrs. Devlina Chatterjee’s (Faculty in charge) vote of thanks .
Madam expressed
sincere gratitude to the industry fraterntiies from different
sectors for providing their valubale times
with us on weekends. Apart from that
, being the faculty coorodiantor, she also expressed her thanks the
organising
committee and encouraged the students to make the extravangaza even bigger next
time.
A
Articles by: Saikat, Ishan, Pallavi ,Utkarsh, Manpreet, Kinsuk , Bhavna
, Somya Goel , Arunangshu , Shubham, Meenal(MBA : 2015-17)
Photographs by: Kinsuk
& Arka (MBA: 2015-17)
Compiled and Edited by:
Bhavna Uttamchandani (Jr. PR
team)
Kinsuk
Ghatak (Jr. CR Team)
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