XIMB hosts Ashwamedh 09

Updated on: Monday, August 31, 2009

Bhubaneswar: Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB) on Saturday hosted Ashwamedh ‘09, which was organised by XOPS-the Operations committee of XIMB.

Ashwamedh is a national level annual seminar conducted by XIMB on important contemporary issues that affect the business in the area of Operations Management.

The speakers for this year were Sujit Sanyal, Sr V P - Business Operations, Ricoh, Simanta Mohanty, GM - HR, IBM, Rajarshi Chatterjee, director - CRM, Cognizant, Satish Dhawan, DGM - Central Planning, TATA Motors, and Sanjay Gupta, COO, JK Agrigenetics.

On the 29th of August, 2009, Combating Recession through Operational Excellence was the theme chosen for this year.

The event started with the traditional lamp-lighting ceremony. Thereafter, the panel members released the Ashwamedh journal for the year. Sujit Sanyal kicked off the event by presenting the various strategies which should be implemented in the times of recession through the perspective of sales and marketing. He also explicitly mentioned strategies like focusing on retaining existing customers and increased communication with these customers which Ricoh put in practice to reduce the effects of recession.

Simanta Mohanty addressed it, as “Is operational excellence enough to combat recession?” Mohanty highlighted how the HR function becomes all more important in these recessionary times. He also reached out to the students of XIMB and appealed them to explore the unsighted domains, map operations in these domains and thus maintain the operational excellence template.

Describing outsourcing as a domain of IT industry which works on the operational excellence, Rajarshi Chatterjee reminded the audience of simple fundamentals and basics, and accentuated the fact that every aspect of operational excellence begins with discipline in everything we do and then doing it in a better way. He shared strategies to survive during these recessionary times which included customer relationships, vendor relationships, business processes, maintenance of internal systems and data management and the organizational culture. ‘Measure, report and act’ was the mantra which he gave to the students.

Representing the manufacturing sector, Satish Dhawan gave an insight into the combating strategies from the manufacturing perspective. He talked about the 3-phased strategy of cost reduction, domestic growth and international growth and also discussed ongoing initiatives in TATA motors like Kaizen, TPM and 5S where the focus is on interacting to improve continuously.

On the sidelines, there was also a paper writing contest on the theme of the event which got over 100 entries from the top B schools of the country. The team from FMS bagged the first position whereas the team from IIM-Ahmedabad secured the second spot. The papers of the top 8 teams of the contest have been published in this year’s Ashwamedh Journal.

Professor Subhajyoti Ray proposed the vote of thanks and highlighted the undercurrent of the various strategies, that how the eminent panelists from different sectors gave their opinions and it is the implementation of all these small but significant strategies which will make a bigger impact.

XIMB hosts Ashwamedh 09

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