Guest Lecture By Mr. Procyon Mukherjee, Chief Procurement Officer - India, LafargeHolcim

The Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur had the privilege of hosting Mr Procyon Mukherjee, Chief Procurement Officer – India, LafargeHolcim on 23rd August 2018 under the ‘Vaarta’ guest lecture series. Mr Mukherjee has worked in leadership positions across India and Europe in various capacities in Manufacturing, including Merger & Acquisition, Strategic Management, Supply Chain Management and Project Management across diverse industries such as Philips India, Indian Aluminium Company, Hindalco and Novelis. Apart from being a manufacturing leader, Mr Mukherjee is an avid reader, writer and social thinker. He leveraged this to connect with the millennials in the crowd.     Mr Mukherjee started by setting up the context of the lecture which was about procurement in manufacturing. He explained the job of a Procurement Officer was to reduce the overall cost while all other individual costs were rising. Supply chain management is about solving the various puzzles with different objective functions clashing with each other and coming up with an optimized solution. He exclaimed that the need for optimized supply chain management and logistics is growing with the connected world. The economic scenario of one country, especially the ones as the United States and China have an adverse effect on the world trade. Also, different economies have different growth rates for the same product owing to various differences like geographies, business strategies and perceptions. He talked about the importance of Competitive Advantage in understanding the value chain and explained the concept with examples. He summarized the requirements of infrastructure and reduction of delays in logistics. He also touched upon the involvement of new technologies like IoT and Blockchain for more efficient and transparent supply chain management and logistics. He shared with us the importance of creating a vision for the next few years in business and then work on it in a back-tracing fashion.   Towards the closure of the session, Mr Mukherjee answered the questions put forward by the up-coming managers of tomorrow. It was an informative session that built our base for learning the complexities of businesses and gave us a holistic view of Logistics and supply chain management.