During the first week of our orientation into Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli, fondly known as IIM Trichy we got a glimpse of how we will delve into the academics. The session on Operation Management conducted by Professor Sirish Gouda and Professor Sivakumar S. was one of the greatest surprises. When we entered the classroom we were greeted with the warm smiles of the professors and were instructed to occupy any of the chairs around the several round tables.
Each table had five chairs around it and five coloured bowls(which signified 5 units) in front of each chair. One of the bowls had several plastic chips, a dice and a sheet of tabulated paper. We were then explained in detail the task we had to perform. After we had completed our game and noted down the results on the sheet, the results were fed into a computer model to generate graphs of the performance of each of the five units. The model generated graphical representations of each iteration. This was a simulation game to show us how bottlenecks get formed in the supply chains even if one of the components in the chain stops working at good efficiency. This is one of the primary reasons for the formation of long queues. We also understood that performance of the last unit was the most dismal because it was dependent on all the other units ahead of it. Often by comparing just the performance numbers, we can wrongly attribute the blame on the last unit but instead, we should analyse the performance of the entire chain.
I was able to relate this concept to my previous work experience completely and it helped me to understand this perspective. I could now understand the reason that even with the optimum efficiency of the unit with the poor performance numbers it could never increase its performance numbers. The problem lay somewhere else in the chain which caused cascading effects on the subsequent units. This made me realise that we should not get too narrow-minded in our approach to any problem and should analyse all the aspects of it.
I truly look forward to having more such rewarding experiences here in IIM Trichy.
Which ABG company would you want to work for and why?
If given an opportunity I would like to work for Aditya Birla Capital Limited(ABCL). I have a previous work experience of working in a firm which catered to clients in the Alternative Asset Management domain. The projects I worked on were of clients with an AUM of approximately 64 million CHF. The projects gave me an opportunity to work in the finance domain and gain exposure to how the things work. Since ABCL has a strong presence all over India in over 500 cities and caters to more than 5.5 million customers with an asset base of 85000 crore INR. This will ensure that I get multiple good opportunities to learn and apply my skill set which I have acquired over these years along with the management and leadership training from IIM Trichy.
This article is written by Ipshita Dutta - Class of 2020