He opined that today the major challenge faced by the industry is how to use its supply chain strategy as a competitive advantage rather than just a bottom line enhancer tool. Thus the focus of the session was “Building Competitive Advantage through lean and agile supply chain”.
Mr Sukumar initiated with clarifying the basic concepts related to SCM. To the delight of the audience the complex, theoretical concepts were put forward in a very simplistic and practical manner. He explained about the traditional supply chain practices in sectors like Auto and Retail. Today apart from these traditional domains SCM is spreading its scope to sectors like Banking, Pharma and even Human Resources. Objective of SCM today is evolving to provide full value spend to an organisation i.e. how to extract more value from each rupee spent.
As the contemporary business environment demands highly dynamic strategies, so is the need from an organisation’s supply chain. Mr Sukumar, spoke in detail about the various initiatives taken by corporate in this regard. He divulged that today the efforts are made to improve parameters like integration, flow, flexibility, synchronization, efficiency and service. As the consumer preferences are changing very fast and the product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter, speed to market is the key performance area for a supply chain strategy. With demand fore-casting becoming more difficult flexibility and synchronized supply chain is the need of hour. He emphasised that there is a paradigm shift happening, for good, from cost of purchase to total cost of ownership. Vendors have to become business partners and elasticity of the capacity is the key to success. The major problems faced by Indian industry are lack of movement tracking and lack of movement visibility, long lead time, skewed production, low productivity, and sub optimization of facilities. The answers lied in lean manufacturing, Just-In-Time, six-sigma, and SMID.
The lecture was full of real – case studies and examples and was a truly interactive session, where the students asked intelligent and profound queries to the expert. It was apparent from their satisfied looks that it was indeed a enlightening and rewarding experience for them.
At the end his closing remark was “ No strategy can be static and success will lie in adapting to new learning : SCM will have to look into new domains and keep evolving in order to keep providing a competitive edge to businesses”. With this he urged the students interested in this domain to widen their scope of learning and truly inspired them to add more value to themselves.