On the 28th of February 2015, Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur, had the privilege of hosting Mr. Anand Maithani – Head SCM, Apollo Tyres Limited as a part of Vaarta ’15 series of guest lectures.
An engineer from Nagpur University and an MBA graduate from Symbiosis Pune, he has over sixteen years of experience in the field of supply chain management. He was associated with renowned firms such as PepsiCo and Philips before assuming his role at Apollo Tyres.
Mr Maithani started off the guest lecture by discussing some real world problems faced by a Supply Chain Manager. How the dynamic business context, the ecosystem of Supply Chain and the evolution of patterns and expectations, are the present day challenges in Supply Chain Management. These words were a great incite to the students with them coming right from the horse’s mouth.
He then moved on to discuss the six themes for Supply Chain Management, namely; Collaboration, Tailored or Segmented approaches, frequent Planning across multiple horizons, implementing “Pull” across the Supply Chain, ensuring business needs drive Technology and Reorganizing Supply Chain Management capability. He also mentioned how business management skills, negotiation skills and the dire need for industries to collaborate with academia are the trending requirements for managing a successful Supply Chain.
In conclusion, he brought out the analogy of football and the supply chain, where supply chain managers are the mid-fielders, right at the centre, aware of what is happening at the backend as well as the frontend, and thus, in a way responsible for the whole process. On a lighter note, Mr. Maithani concluded, “Whenever in doubt; blame the supply chain!” By the end of this interactive session, the students, especially the Operations aspirants, were left with many key take-ways and were much more aware of challenges in the field of Supply Chain.