The 2
nd day of IIM Ranchi’s Management Conclave, Radix was organized by the Consulting Club, Conundrum and its central theme was the impact of Big Data and Analytics on Indian retail and e-commerce industries. Dignitaries and speakers with credible experience in the field of Analytics graced the occasion with their presence and enlightened one and all with their insightful perspectives and wisdom on the central theme of the day.
The key-note address was delivered by
Prof. U. Dinesh Kumar, Professor of Business Analytics and Information Systems at IIM Bangalore
. He dwelled at length on the importance of Big Data and Analytics and how analytics is the future of everything. Professor Kumar further stated,
“Analytics is nothing but a way of handling uncertainty”. Primarily, analytics is either descriptive or predictive. Prof. Kumar also discussed how industries such as the Airlines largely rely on analytics for the smooth running of their operation.
Mr. Angshuman Bhattacharya, Founder of SIBIA Analytics and Consulting, was the next speaker to present his views on how renowned retailers across the globe such as Walmart, use Big Data and Analytics to streamline their operations. He stated, “
Walmart has a fetish for data and analytics”. He emphasized on several revelations that analytics brings to light, which is extremely handy for the retailers. For example, Analytics can reveal the different combinations of items sold together so that they can be offered to the customer as a bundled pack or placed on adjacent shelves in the retailer store. He stated that even though Indian retailers are yet to adopt analytics to smoothen their operations because of limited management support in this regard, the silver lining is apparently there. He cited the example of Kishore Biyani’s, Future Group which is all set to team up with Analytics giant, Dunnhumby to adopt analytics in their operations.
Then, it was
Mr. Nagendra Sastry, Analytics head at IQR Consulting, who took to the podium to talk about the emergence of Big Data. He talked about how the 3 Vs (Volume, Variety and Velocity) lead to creation of huge amounts of unstructured data. He stated that,
“Huge amount of data (volume) from different sources (variety) is being generated at a high speed (velocity)”. He talked about the different databases which are used to store Big Data such as Redis, Hadoop, Cassandra etc.
The last speaker for the day was
Mr. Goutam Das, Founder and CEO of InsAnalytics
. He told the students that in order to become experts at Data Analytics, they will have to play and dirty their hands with data. The rest of his speech focused on the intricacies of data analytics as a field, citing real world examples wherever needed.
Towards the end, there was a panel discussion moderated by
Prof. Pradip Kumar Bala (Dean, Academics, IIM Ranchi and an analytics enthusiast) on the challenges for implementing Big Data Solutions in Indian Retail Industry. The panel discussion was extremely insightful for the students where the dignitaries pointed out that companies which won’t be adopting big data solutions will lose out heavily to their competition and might as well perish.
Two eventful days of the third management concave at IIM Ranchi came to a close with a vote of thanks by the President of the Student Council, Chetan Ingaleshwar. Radix lived up to its expectations and even surpassed it; as was evident from the numerous praises received from the guest speakers on the eager participation of the students. IIM Ranchi will be back with more such management conclaves in the future attracting renowned industrialists, entrepreneurs and academicians from India and abroad.
