My Personal Experience in the field of Operations

 

Hello Ladies & Gentleman!

I am at the last leg of my blog publishing, hope to return back one day soon. Since this could be one of my last blogs for LSCM, I decided to speak about my personal experience in the field of logistics and supply chain. 

One of the main reasons why I joined an MBA program was because of operations. My mentors from my previous organization observed me closely and suggested that I would do good in operations and especially under Logistics, as I was partly involved in the same for my previous organization. 

I previously worked for a firm called Ethnus Consultancy Services, a Training and Development firm, focused on training students across the country and the Middle East for their placements and competitive exams. I started my career as an Aptitude and Soft skills trainer, training students across the country ranging from TISS, IIT, BITS Pilani, etc., to tier - 3 colleges. From the beginning of my career, I was more interested in coordinating with the operations team, suggesting them efficient ideas and a bond grew between the team and me, though I belonged to a different team. 

Even before the completion of 1 year in my organization, I was given team lead roles, where I had to coordinate with a team of trainers and the head office, making me a part of the operations team. Though people in the operations team were well experienced, they were lacking new ideas. This is where my contribution started kicking in by suggesting them cost-effective and efficient ideas. Though I did not have an official designation from the organization for working with the operations team, my contributions were quite similar to that of their team. 

Sooner from Team lead to Project Manager and then to Key Accounts Manager, my promotion went on and the organization formed a separate team called the Training & Operations team, where I was the lead person in that team. So what made the organization, do this for me. First of all my contributions irrespective of my job profile and salary. Secondly, not working for the sake of it, but for self-satisfaction.

So the most important question you would be thinking now is, what did he contribute? My contributions started from the basic simple suggestions like whenever the organization was booking tickets for the trainers to travel, especially via bus, redbus or Ticketgoose were the new emerging apps during that time and there were coupon codes which could be used for booking tickets which they weren't aware of, and one of the senior managers did an analysis and said that this actually saved them almost a lakh at the end of the year. 

Flights can be cheaper than A/C trains and buses. This was something the operations team did not notice and when they were booking trains or buses for long-distance travel, which actually costs more or similar to what flights were charging (Thanks to LCC). Once they realized this, they started booking flights for long-distance travel instead of trains or buses, which most essentially saved something more than money, which was time.  

Also, whenever we had to courier the reading materials/books/test papers, the courier companies were charging hefty, which the company was paying initially as they were small in no's but later when I had to do a similar operation, I decided that this was way too expensive and found out that the logistics services were doing almost the same for almost 1/10th of the price. So I quickly adapted to that and also informed the operations team about the same, which they started following from then on. 

My core operations involved when I had to run a particular training program on my own. When I was appointed as the Key accounts manager, I had to manage training and operations for almost 10,000 students at VIT University across three campuses, Vellore, Chennai, and Amaravati. From scheduling to accommodation to transportation and CRM I was the sole responsible person for it and I had to work hard to maintain it. Also, I was the reporting manager for almost 40 trainers, managing their leaves and schedules and checking at their performance for their appraisal. This was the most challenging part as the company had fewer trainers and I had to manage with whatever limited resources they gave and the situation was always unfavorable. 

Amidst this, the organization recruited freshly graduated MBA graduates with no prior work experience. What I found fascinating was that they knew a lot of things about this which most of my managers did not know. That is when I realized, education is never a waste and they had so many ideas and knowledge which astonished me and made me think that MBA indeed teaches you a lot more than the organization or work sometimes. Soon after I realized this, I decided to quit my job and join the MBA program which some of my mentors suggested, and decided to choose operations as one of my specializations.

This was just a brief summary of my experience (how much ever I remembered) in the field of operations. Well, the most important life lesson that I learnt was, spend your time with people who are more knowledgeable and wiser than you, as they will teach you a lot more things than any other medium. One of the reasons I chose Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore for my MBA as it has astonishing faculty members with brilliant minds who could inspire and give knowledge to us which could make the better of us tomorrow. 

Special thanks to Dr. Hemamala Krishnan, for giving me the opportunity to write these blogs, which did sound tedious at the start but in the end, it made me realize that "journey is the reward". 

Thanks to all the readers, out there I hope you have a great life filled with happiness and joy, also most importantly good health.

Time to say goodbye, farewell!

I wouldn't forget my signature goodbye, so here you go

Adios, Amigo!

- Varadharaju R