Global Supply Chain

 

Global Supply Chain

 

Mr. Chidambaram Elangovan – Senior Supply Chain Auditor at General Electric, had addressed us virtually from Cincinnati, during our Logistics and Supply Chain Management class on 17/08/2020 from 7.00am to 8.30am IST held on Microsoft Teams.

The discussion started off by Mr. Chidambaram giving us a brief about his formal education, his employment and his current role at General Electric. He also encouraged us to take up the micro master’s program of Supply Chain offered by MIT through Edx, to get a more thorough understanding about the fundamentals of SC enabling us to perform better in our careers. Carrying the discussion forward Mr. Chidambaram explained how engineering can aid operations and global supply chains; he briefly touched upon the concepts of Kaizen (small but continuous improvements) & Lean (elimination of wastes, or increasing productivity).

Mr. Chidambaram continued the discussion by comparing the concepts of how the Business to Consumer Market (B2C), and the Business to Business (B2B) market. In the B2C scenario, the market is driven by customer needs which is created by marketing and it is the Supply Chain that is responsible to form the customer experience in the market whereas in the B2B scenario, the processes are driven by Supply Chain, production & engineering functions and not much of marketing activities are performed by the OEM firms. In both the cases it is the Supply Chain that bears the responsibility of ensuring that the right product is available at the right time at the right place.

To motivate us on how an engineer can become a leading operations specialist, Mr. Chidambaram referred to the current CEO of Apple Inc, Mr. Tim Cook, who graduated as an Industrial Engineer, became the Chief Operating Officer and then the CEO.

SC plays a major role in deciding the cost competitiveness of a business, but the decision lies with the company whether to make its SC more effective or responsive, for example, Amazon has made the SC more responsive whereas UPS has a more efficient SC.

Mr. Chidambaram also discussed about the Independence Day Speech by our Honorable Prime Minister, and discussed about the Make in India concept and what role will the SC play in development of the country. Not only will it make the Made in India products available to the world, it will also create a demand for the human resource thereby creating ample job opportunities for carrying out the SC Activities.

Mr. Chidambaram explained us the various roles and responsibilities of the leaders, top management and the executives involved in the operations of GE more specific to the decision making and management by KPIs. He shared his learnings about the people management and behavior in a global perspective, how human resources and communication becomes the key to success and being bold to express our thoughts and ideas on an open forum.

Mr. Chidambaram also shared his experience of staying in Patna and working for Indian Railways project that GE has taken up to produce 200 locomotives.

 

Towards the end of the session Mr. Chidambaram suggested the SC enthusiast to read a few books to gain more knowledge about operations those books were:

1.      Eliyahu M. Goldratt - Theory of Constraints (1999)

2.      Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox - The Goal_ A Process of Ongoing Improvement-North River Press (2004)

3.      James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones - Lean Thinking_ Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated-Free Press (2003)

4.      Rose George – Ninety Percent of Everything