'Synergy'06' focuses on emerging business challenges

Mumbai, Oct 22: The annual seminar series, 'Synergy-2006' which was recently held at the Shailesh J Mehta School of Management (SJMSM) here focused on various emerging business challenges.

In fact, 'Synergy 2006' was an enriching experience for the students as they got to interact with the industry on a variety of areas like Marketing and Operations.

The event saw a galaxy of speakers enthrall the audience on a wide range of topics from Performance Management in Supply Chain Management to Innovative Marketing Policies. It also witnessed a highly competitive Summer Projects Contest, the finalists being selected by a very high panel of professors of the SJMSOM and eminent persons from the industry.

The first talk was delivered by S V Sukumar, Vice President&Head Supply Chain Management, ECS, on managing Risk in Supply Chain.

He said that 'There are risk on both sides demand side and supply side. There are several factors that add to risk due to changes in business environment like globalization of the market, shorter product and technology lifecycles, proliferation of products and variants, changing profiles of the customers and market segment and legal®ulatory conditions of the countries'.

Manisha Lath Gupta of Consumer Innovation Centre, Colgate Palmolive India, spoke on consumer behavior and various approaches being adopted by Consumer Innovation Centers (CIC) at Colgate Palmolive to study the Indian consumer behaviour.

The on the presentation made by P K Bharadwaj, General Manager-West, TCU SCS, on the occasion was Indian logistics scenario. He explained how the logistic companies help businesses by making possible direct-to-home delivery in metros and big cities, taking small size product to villages, creating a network of warehouses for JIT delivery and also establishing visibility in the movement.

Kaushik Banerjee, Head of Sourcing, Purchase&SCM at Sandoz Pvt Ltd, gave an insightful and informative discourse on the Supply Chain Management (SCM) concepts, processes and elaborated on the demand driven S&OP model and related performance measures. He said that S&OP is a cross-functional business review process that integrates demand and supply planning. It emphasizes the need to link up all the strategic initiatives of the organisation. In the present business scenario the time horizons are getting shorter. It is imperative in such a scenario that the Supply Chain lead times are small. S&OP model helps achieve this, he added.

Sreenivas Nagappa, CEO of Matrikx Industries South East Asia Pvt Ltd, delivered a riveting talk on at the Marketing and Operations Continuum. He started the talk by defining marketing as 'creation of consumer demand' and operations as 'fulfilment of consumer demand'.

Praveen Tripathi, CEO of Hansa Consulting, emphasized that advertising in a combination of media would give disproportionately better results than advertising in a single media. A company will have a higher advantage in terms of sales if it distributes its advertising expenditure between television and print media rather than focusing only on any one of them. The speaker supported this with a number of research findings conducted in various countries like US, UK, France, Australia etc.

In addition a lively panel discussion was held on the topic 'Building a marketing oriented strategy' attended by R S Vasan, VP, Sales&Marketing, Johnson&Johnson Sreenivas Nagappa, CEO, Matrikx Industries South East Asia Pvt Ltd Jerry John, CEO, Indix; Prof Atanu Ghosh, faculty SJMSOM and Strategic Advisor to Director, IIT Bombay. In all, 'Synergy 2006' was a grand success in terms of the amount of knowledge enrichment one derived from it.

UNI