COVER STORY

Come October 2021, and we are back with our most coveted Celerity 40 Under 40 and 30 Under 30 Awards, where we bestow upon the younger supply chain fraternity greater admiration and celebrate their innovative streaks. Just like last year, though we hosted the event online, it was no less than a starry affair with all the winners taking away the crowning glory with pride. In an ode to cherish these precious moments and offer these Supers an incredible growth path, here’s presenting their poised supply chain innovations that have helped achieve tangible gains in their respective organizations on the back of an integrated & intelligent supply chain. These innovations are also future-forward supply chain best practices for companies to follow and shape up their exciting supply chain journey. Take a look at the promising ideas that can potentially change the supply chain landscape of tomorrow…

A TOAST TO THE SUPERS ACHIEVERS & STARS

40-UNDER-40 SUPPLY CHAIN SUPER ACHIEVERS 2021

Amrit Bajpai, COO, WayCool Foods and Products Pvt. Ltd.

A fragmented and disorganized supply chain has been the bane of Indian agriculture for decades. The lack of accurate on-time information to all stakeholders of the Agri value chain has forced them to work in silos, resulting in inefficiencies across the entire supply chain. At WayCool, we have been striving hard to resolve these inefficiencies by creating a transparent ecosystem for all stakeholders and infusing new-age technologies like AI, ML, Deep Learning, and Advanced Robotics to enhance our supply chain processes by reimagining how food moves from farm to fork. RAPID, our indigenously developed Automated SCM System, is integrated with the aforementioned technologies and our proprietary planning platform that seamlessly helps in creating an agile supply chain that is instantly responsive to market supply and demand. Here is what we have succeeded in achieving in a short span of time:

1. Reimagined Supply Chain for Fresh Produce: In our automated Distribution Centers, the inbound crates are automatically scanned and mapped against the PO, weighed, UV-scanned to eliminate contaminations, and robotically placed on conveyor belts for instant dispatch. With over 40% of the crates being processed without any human touch, we have been able to reduce our wastage to 5-8% vis-a-vis industry average of 25-30%. Additionally, we have developed India’s first Automated Grading & Packing Machine for hard produce like onions, potatoes, garlic, and lemon that allows accurate grading of over 1.25 tons of produce per hour and automated packaging of over 20 packets per minute.

2. Reimagined Supply Chain for Staples: Frugal, need-based automation ensures 2X efficiency than industry standards. This indigenous picker App lets the picker scan produce an SKU barcode against available SOs for that specific SKU. The picker can complete picking on the handheld device itself. Once SO is thoroughly picked, the invoice is generated, and materials are dispatched.

3. Reimagined Supply Chain of FMCG Products for an FMCG Leader: Our super-warehouse leverages Advanced Robotics to automatically pack each distributor’s orders by using our Fulfilment Centers as cross-docks. Our indigenously developed IoT conveyor intuitively reads the barcode on the crate and instantly displays where the crate has to be precisely placed in the delivery vehicle.

This innovation alone has helped us to reduce our delivery times from 15 mins to a mere 2 mins, with only a staff of 2 people! All of the above have enabled us to not just reduce operational costs, but has helped us improve our productivity by 1.5X, capacity by 3X, and top line by 4X resulting in an ARR of Rs1000 crore in just 12 months!

Puneet Agarwal,

Chief Manager - Strategic Sourcing (SCM — CP), Bajaj Electricals Ltd. I had initiated the idea of providing a common platform to every individual within the company and our outsourced partners to develop the concepts related to cost reduction and quality improvement. The online platform was created with the help of IT, and it was shared with everyone in the company. This has led to more than 1000 ideas contributing significant savings for the company. To evaluate and select the ideas to be taken forward, a committee was formed comprising a few team members across crossfunctional teams and decided the next course of action. Weekly meetings are scheduled with the stakeholders to chart out the implementation plan. A team was prepared to schedule personal visits at the partners and explain the importance of the initiative and how it would bring business to the organization.

In my previous role, we developed real-time end-to-end tracking from Order to Delivery (including customer returns and transit damages) and enhanced visibility and service across India. This solution provided easy access and end-to-end visibility with tracking at each stage and information /communication to all stakeholders. Information flow is secured and integrated with SAP, providing status/KPI information through a userfriendly interface. ASN (Advanced shipment notification) is sent to selected customers with complete order details and estimated delivery date. Post-delivery scanned copy of POD (Proof of Delivery) is uploaded in the system by the transporter. The solution also manages customer returns (through workflow approval) as well as tracks transit damages. Warehousing and transportation KPIs like Truck placement, Loadability, Turn Around Time (TAT), Transit damages, etc., are also managed in real-time and improved through fact-based reviews with 3PLs and transporters. The system also supports calculation provision and checking transporter’s bills effectively. Entire tracking is web-enabled and can also be done through mobile phones by stakeholders. This innovation resulted in 10%+ cost reduction through better visibility, data analytics, and optimization. It also led to sustainable improvement in on-time customer delivery above 90+%. Warehouse turnaround time compliance improved to 95+%; and registered Vehicle loadability improvement from 75% to 90%.

At Accex, we have a firm focus on our customers’ requirements. Our culture of operations and people excellence ensures that our customers’ needs always come first. We spend time and effort to figure out challenges with all our customers before suggesting a personalized solution.

In line with this ideology, we approached one of India’s leading manufacturers and exporters of footwear products to partner with them in their supply chain journey. Our customer exports to more than 80 countries. As they are located in the hinterland, they ask the shipping lines to reposition the containers for stuffing at their factories. These containers would then be transported via ICD through rail to the port for sailing.

They were facing challenges in repositioning containers at the factory for stuffing and irregular rail transit times. This resulted in extensive detention and demurrage costs while shipping exports at the source and destination ports. This also resulted in delays for export order fulfillment and hence reduction in service levels and order loss. Additionally, with the current scenario where sea freight rates are sky-high, they are looking at having multiple sea freight options to have better-negotiating power.

We designed an end-to-end solution where cargo from all the factories will be consolidated in an export warehouse near the port, and it will be fulfilled from the factories via road transport. The entire order fulfillment will be managed from this location. This has resulted in substantial cost savings for our customers. Post this, we have offered this solution to many other customers, and this has become one of the most successful growth areas for Accex, making a substantial contribution to our top line.

MENAP had set up a strong Cash/DIOH governance to optimize inventory across the supply network (Finished Goods, Raw and Pack Material, Engineering Spares) to mitigate the impact of COVID driven slowdowns in Q4’20 and support growth in Q1’21. Critical planning interventions through strategic FG/ R&P build-ups, critical supplier risk Management, and Key-Material planning scheduling changes led to inventory/cash reduction by 18% vs. 2020 through close collaboration across supply chain/ commercial teams.

Ashwani Singh, Head – Supply Chain, Capital Foods Pvt. Ltd.

Aditya Sharma, Business Development Lead, Accex Supply Chain and Warehousing Pvt Ltd.

Vignesh Vishwanathan, Product Supply Lead – Middle East North Africa and Pakistan (MENAP), Mondelēz Biscuits WLL

Faraz Hussain, Director – Category & Procurement, AgroStar

Ravindra Agarwal,

External Manufacturing LeaderFemcare, Johnson & Johnson The sudden outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic had been challenging for the Agri Input Industry for many reasons. Due to this woeful onset, farmers were suffering from supply shortages of fertilizers and agrochemicals. During this period, the supplies of RM were crashed, and even available product supply was rare due to disturbance in the supply ecosystem. After the announcement of nationwide lockdown in March 2020, we urgently drafted a plan of action to help farmers deal with the uncertainties. Our primary focus was to bridge the gap between the need of farmers and the adequate supply of quality Agri input to them at their doorstep without risking their life. We worked on inventory classification and demand-based prioritization at fulfillment centers, which helped to capture the product’s availability to the sales team. We reverseengineered the product supply chain and helped vendors to have a milk run for small but repeated supplies to overcome production bottlenecks.

As a firm believer in building people before business, we curated a set of experts as a procurement team who were supposed to focus on supply chain nuances, unlike category folks who gun for revenue and product margins. Due to the restrictions imposed by the government, traveling from one’s place to office or vendor location was a problem, so the team had to stay connected for several hours virtually through social media apps, Zoom, Google Meet, etc. The procurement team worked relentlessly and took conscious and calibrated measures during covid lockdowns to improve supply efficiencies like inventory days optimization and supply TAT management to have minimum demand-supply distortion.

Innovative practices were brought in product packaging to optimize cost and reduce wastages, bringing agility at supplier location. Supplier diversity was ensured to promote localization and reduce TAT. This led to minimum sales opportunity loss and drastically reduced supply distortion even during the pandemic. While the competition was struggling to register growth, our D2C model, with the help of the above initiatives, helped grow business with a stellar performance of double-digit growth in revenues.

When I completed my engineering, I knew very little about supply chain. I started my career as an Engineer in Auto Component manufacturing facility. Now after 17 year of professional graph when I look back, I can say with confidence that supply chain is the most diverse role that any professional would look forward to in terms of gaining newer experiences, insights about the whole value chain and being a valued contributor in this highly dynamic field. It’s the supply chain’s highly dynamic attribute that kept me excited every day, week months and year where everyone can have ample opportunity to have diverse experiences across pillars of supply chain.

Going ahead, I think fundamentals of supply chain will remain strong on the back of these disruptions:

Standardization to Personalization: Our consumers are becoming more and more aware about what they need, how they need, when they want it and very important what aspect they want into their product. It’s no more standard product or consumer specifications. Today consumers don’t want any standard product, they want the product made as per their individual personnel specification. This will be a major paradigm shift in near future in supply chain.

Linear to Circular Supply Chain: We have always believed supply chain key pillars to be Source-Plan-Make-Deliver. The circularity aspect which was long forgotten has brought back the spotlight on sustainability, necessitating supply chain teams to think in Circular way that how they can collect the residual/waste from their consumers and bring back to the starting point “Source” to recycle or reuse to minimize the overall environmental impact. It’s all about working towards ‘Deliver to Source’ model and completing the loop.

Digitization-Big Data-AI/ML-Blockchain: Speed and precision are going to be key KPIs for supply chain in future. To enable this, digitization across leg of supply chain is going to be crucial to make supply chain much more streamlined, agile and mobile to create faster flow. AI and ML are making complex operations simple and are assisting companies in predicting consumer behavior. Blockchain technology, in next 10 years, is going to change the way we do transactions across supply chain.

As Supply Chain Enabler for India Business of Legacy Arysta Lifesciences, I worked on shaping future Strategic plans for Arysta Business in India Region and Arysta India Manufacturing Unit. I worked to ensure smooth integration and Growth Strategy of Arysta Legacy Business and Arysta India Manufacturing unit with UPL India using System and Process implementation.

I lead the supply planning, integration planning & execution, and supply chain transformation initiatives of Arysta India. I worked with sales teams of different regions in ensuring smooth business during the transition period. I managed and facilitated cross-functional teams covering manufacturing, planning, sales, IT, and procurement, driving the legacy business’s capacity utilization and operational efficiency. Some of the results achieved were – improved service level, reduced inventory level, alignment of processes of Arysta with UPL, implementation of SAP APO SNP, alignment of BOM Master and Material Master for the legacy Arysta business in UPL Systems, shifting of externally manufactured products to the newly acquired plant. Total capacity utilization has gone to 7X in 3 years.

During my stint at Reliance Digital, I decided to reduce inventory, not by traditional methods of MarkDown or Return to vendor (RTV), which are primarily reactive approaches. Due to poor vendor fill rate and poor forecast accuracy, I observed that we were forced to keep high safety stock majorly for A Class items. So, I first improved the forecast accuracy through a collaborative forecasting approach. I started sharing our 13 weeks of rolling forecast with brands and asked them to update our numbers as per their stock availability for the next four weeks. Upon receiving the updated forecast (we called it RTF – Return to Forecast) from brands, we updated those numbers in our system. This ensured maximum supply from brands against purchase order & helped improve vendor fill rate.

Finally, we reduced safety stock by linking safety stock with vendor fill rate. For example, the Brand ‘X’ Fill rate was 50%. So, to mitigate the stock-out issue, we were keeping 30 days of safety stock. However, with the collaborative forecasting approach, the fill rate was improved to 70%, and with this improved vendor fill rate, we reduced safety stock from 30 days to 20 Days. We used the ‘What-if’ analysis approach to arrive at optimum safety stock.

In 2019-20, we initiated Capacity Exploitation Activity at a Supply Partner Fan factory. The objective was to increase the production capacity with existing resources. At the time of the project initiation, the monthly capacity of the factory was less than the total requirement. We conducted a session with the factory team to understand the work timings, targeted production, and actual achievement per day and took the overview of complete end-to-end operations. Based on the inputs from the factory and taking the ToC route, we identified the constraint, which was the powder-coated blade paint shop. We took a deep dive into the problem areas. We found many challenges the factory was facing, including the non-availability of raw material before the feeding station, workforce absenteeism, morning meeting, lunch/snack time, delay in start post-lunch. After analyzing the cause, we derived the workable solution to boost plant productivity, which entailed that raw material should be made available before the end of the day at the riveting station so that CCR never runs idle. The factory needs to ensure buffers of riveted blades for one to two rotations of CCR. We also identified an idle machine available at the factory, which can be operated to maintain sufficient buffers before CCR to avoid any starvation. We also initiated buffers for nozzles to maintain one more set of nozzles readily available at the CCR. After implementing the above steps, the CCR capacity increased by 1,800 to 2,000 fans per day.

Sandeep Pratap, Lead – RM Procurement - India, Asia & ASEANZ, UPL Ltd.

Vipin Magwane, Analytics & Modeling Specialist, Accenture Solution Pvt. Ltd.

Naresh Rao Manda, General Manager, Bajaj Electricals Ltd.

Nirav Kotecha,

Asst General Manager, Panasonic Life Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. After successful Inventory Management and consecutive improvement in all SCM KPIs in Wires & cable and PVC Tape for 4 years, I was nominated as a Leader for the Inventory Management Project of the entire organization, which consists of 8 different Businesses. My past achievements led the management to empower me with two more business units – Switchgear & Water Heater in my Portfolio. As far as the SCM innovation is concerned, our team reduced significant inventory in 2 years after implementing and executing Core Activities. We redefined the Standard Inventory Level of respective businesses considering their challenges, capacity limitations, sales pattern, seasonality & profit margins, and approval from respective business heads, SCM heads & management. We integrated Standard Inventory level with MSL (Max and Min Stock level) at Factories, Hub & Spokes. The VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory) system has been initiated at a few OEMs for high-selling SKUs. We combined vehicles of respective factories (includes an OEM) located at a 25 km radius and improved the frequency of vehicles from Factory to Hub & A-Class SKUs to few high selling spokes, which improved our lead time. We worked on the SKU Optimization Project for items not sold over 3 years by discontinuing a few SKUs. Major SKUs were converted on a Make to Order basis, which was part of Product Basket and cannot be discontinued (We started with two businesses initially). Our team also created subgroups to control & reduce unhealthy inventory like excess stock above three months, replacement inventory, old MRP, etc., and to stop the generation of Unhealthy Inventory; we started a Notification system to validate the orders if the customer is logging order more than 6 months sales (We started on a trial basis with one business).

Mohinder Kushwaha,

Business Development Lead – DGM, TVS SCS I joined a fast-paced, growing logistics group, managing business development activities, key account management, and operations; within the first year of inception, the firm touched 1+ million sqft operational for all marquee clients. This was an unprecedented feat concerning the industry. It is imperative that we further increase the pace of acquiring customers and running effective and productive operations for marquee clients. We planned for a regimental system of detailed weekly reviews through multiple calls and meetings every month at logistic parks. We focused on making our operations world-class with productivity, processes, and performance, focusing on increasing productivity and increasing throughput using the best technologies required to run streamlined and synchronized operations. Customer First and CustomerCentric approach, understanding the customers’ pain-areas, needs and then aligning our solutions with what our customers required routed back to the customers with a unique and differential proposal that optimized their entire value chain. At the same time, it was cost-effective.

Conversion of key accounts happened as the customer got aligned and tested our customized network design, services on offering with the state of the art infrastructure, and technology-enabled solutions that were the critical differentiators, vis-a-via competitors. We took the innovative approach by hiring the best-skilled minds: operators, sales professionals, technical staff, project management team, technical minds to support the entire ecosystem with a differential edge over our competitors. We have worked with the best industry practices in every vertical: operations, sales, solution designing, and technology. We chose the blue ocean strategy, and our goals were very well defined and aligned to our mission of reaching our target set for the next 3-5 years. We selected a location to operate the logistics parks, the following upcoming and growing smart cities that increased employment in the particular cities. We spread awareness among our customers with the benefits of starting at these identified towns and locations to save them the cost and reduce their Turn Around Time (TAT) to the end consumers, which worked in our favor. Customers too joined hands and got excited about our new initiates and supported us. We also created new logistic landscapes in certain cities that added value to the entire logistics ecosystem, improving customer experience, customer retention, and customer lifetime value.

TAML, a leading Carbon fiber composite part manufacturer, increased its revenue share from global aerospace customers. During this revenue ramp-up exercise, TAML encountered series of challenges in the supply chain, such as significant inventory holding (~30% of revenue), high inventory aging, shelf-life expiry of material, which led to disposal (> 2 crores per year) and poor procurement planning of materials. All these challenges cumulatively increased the working capital demand, making it difficult for the company to grow.

The supply chain team embarked on implementing Theory of Constraints (ToC) principles in the entire value stream to identify process improvement. We formed a task force team to look at problems through the ToC lens and prepare an action plan for the execution team. The team executed this over a year and delivered stellar results. The inventory holding reduced by 25%, aged inventory was cleared by more than 90%, declined the shelf expiry from 2 crores to 0.4. crore per year. The overall improvement and cost reduction resulted in more than 10 crore savings, around 25% contribution to the bottom line. The supply chain created a significant sustainable impact on the business by becoming leaner and agile in managing the materials. This efficiency drive significantly reduced the working capital (20%) and released the storage space, thus decreasing overall growth CAPEX requirement. The supply chain created a visible impact on operations and helped TAML secure new projects at optimal investment.

US-based MNC India division had acquired the oral rehydration drink brand manufactured using Tetrapack technology from India business conglomerate in 2014. The brand had grown from 80 crores to around 400 crores by 2018. Rehydration drink packs production requires a lot of paper consumption both in Tetrapack and corrugated boxes (Inner trays (27 pc /tray) and outer cartons (3 trays or 81pc/carton). For environmental sustainability and cost optimization, we explored multiple options to reduce the consumption of paper. After numerous trials and experiments, we finalized the idea of eliminating the outer shipper and converting the inner trays to complete corrugated boxes (with artworks) and selling individual trays in the market. This is when project Sahaj (Simplification, Standardisation, Sustainability) came into being.

In the above idea, the sales team objected and confirmed that they could sell only in a pack of 3 trays (as a unit of sale) to customers/distributors to avoid any negative impact on sales. So, we cannot sell individual trays by removing outer cartons. To address the above issues, we implemented external shrink wrapping the three trays (boxes). Though the idea seems very simple, it involved an investment of over 40 lakhs on two shrink wrapping machines.

It was risky to invest such a significant amount (getting regional management approvals) and sell them w/o any trials. After many vendors hopping and persistence to make the project successful, we got hold of one vendor and got the trial done of shrink-wrapping of 3 trays (as one unit). Transit trials were super successful, and product proportion aligned with the sales and marketing team of single selling units to customers (3 trays as one unit), eliminating the need for outer shippers. This exercise resulted in 2 crores + savings per year and saved the equivalent of 21000+ trees. With 50% growth in sales of this brand in the last 3 years has resulted in annual savings of over 500K USD.

Cost of distribution has been highly impacted due to steady increases in fuel prices since last year. Hence it becomes more essential to identify cost-saving opportunities. Freight backhauling is one of the projects initiated to identify opportunities to reduce distribution costs and carbon footprints, which aimed to support Nestle Net Zeroemission roadmaps. The project was kicked off by identifying lanes and raw/packaging suppliers who had significant contributions in inbound trucks at Nestle factories. Basis the existing RM/PM freight and required truck type, I initiated the RFQ process for RM/PM freight movement from suppliers to Nestle factories with our current freight service providers. We achieved a cost reduction of $0.5 million and achieved freight backhauling in 80% of addressable lanes. This project got recognized globally as well as at external forums. We are now in discussions with a few FMCGs to integrate common lanes.

Veera Oruganti, Head – Strategic Sourcing, Syngene International Ltd.

Saurabh Sehgal, General Manager (SCM - Head), Kama Ayurveda

Abhishek Gautam, Senior Manager – Procurement, Nestle

Akhil Damodaran, Program Lead – Emergent Cluster, School of Business, University of Petroleum & Energy Studies

Anil Shah,

Manager – Integrated Solution Sales, DP World With no signs of relief from coronavirus and to protect India’s economy from taking a tailspin, the government announced Unlock 1.0. The challenge before the Indian Airports was to ensure social distancing and other guidelines to avoid crowds, especially at check-in counters, boarding gates, security check, pickup and drop off points, etc. To provide a solution to this, at The University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, me and my team created an optimization tool called ‘AeroOpt,’ to optimize the queue management of passengers keeping COVID-19 social distancing norms. To develop the tool, we also got support from Aerotech support services to understand airport issues better. The management tool works on optimizing the airport infrastructure and staff requirements. It can improve the efficiency of counters, immigration, security, and boarding gates without compromising on social distancing norms. The tool scientifically calculates the optimum number of resources (staff, passengers, counters, queues, etc.) to be allocated to an airline in a given time so that airports follow Covid norms while knowing that they are utilizing their capacity at the level determined.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put global supply chains into the focus of a wider public. Each segment, community, or business got severely impacted due to supply chain disruptions, resulting in companies rethinking supply chains based on improved resilience, risk mitigation, and sustainability. In terms of resilience, all businesses must have visibility on their supply chain needs and velocity to swift between the alternate option to avoid the disruption. This will help to mitigate the risk associated with the business and supply chain. Supply chains have to be socially and environmentally sustainable to bring out the best from the value chain. The partnership of the supply & demand side of the value chain can make sustainability initiatives more feasible. Overcome these challenges can help supply chains to become star performers.

We learned many things during this pandemic, and it has allowed us to work towards a more agile, robust, and sustainable supply chain. Still, there is a lot of Artificial Intelligent potential, which remains untapped. This will rapidly change over the next couple of years, especially in supply chain use cases such as decision support and automation systems. AI's ability to derive insights and make recommendations from a vast amount of data will affect how supply chains work in the future. The next phase of growth will come through the collaborative approach of everyone involved in the value chain, and technology will play a vital role in bringing it all together.

Sushil Hinge,

Manager - Supply Chain Management Doctoral Scholar - S P Jain School of Global Management Digitalization was a luxury before the pandemic, which has become a necessity today. When it comes to healthcare, delivery of life-saving goods is always a priority with lots of external challenges, which increased during this unprecedented situation. Moreover, there was no clarity about the status of Full Truck Load deliveries that increased the number of calls and emails from customers due to a lack of trust & transparency. We came up with the ‘Track ON’ - Live Digital Tracking of Full Truck Load Deliveries. The project is about the assigned drivers giving a missed call to a number that registers the driver’s number via SIM card. This enables us to track the registered drivers’ live location. Simultaneously, an SMS is sent to the customer with a link that tracks the driver’s exact location. This project was live on October 2, 2020, on account of Gandhi Jayanti with the symbol of Mahatma Gandhi’s spectacles as the theme of ‘Transparency.’ It won the hearts of many customers as the trust increased due to transparency and accuracy. Currently, this service has almost 99% utility and has drastically reduced unwanted calls about shipment status and late deliveries.

30-UNDER-30 SUPPLY CHAIN SUPERSTARS 2021

The pandemic has shown that supply chains are not enough to be resilient; they must also be highly agile and dynamic to serve customers even in the most adverse conditions. The world is slowing down as a result of supply chain redundancies today. We will only achieve the highest responsiveness, resilience, and true innovation if we eliminate these redundancies and transition to an automated workflow. At Mate Labs, we strive to bring tomorrow’s technological innovations to combat today’s supply chain challenges. With our core AI approach, we created the world’s fastest AutoML technology, which has even been recognized by Google. Mate Labs was chosen as the only Indian start-up to participate in Google Demo Day Asia in 2019. We help bridge the supply-demand gap with this core AI approach by allowing supply chains to reduce response time from 3 – 4 months to the near real-time response. We are able to empower and strengthen our customers’ supply chain planning decisionmaking through accurate forecasting. This allows our solutions to be unrivaled in terms of speed and accuracy. Today, we help Fortune 500 companies with predictions that are real-time and 100X faster than traditional methods. This provides businesses with a 15%-40% increase in planning/forecasting accuracy. A 5% increase in forecast accuracy improves the bottom line by 1%, adding millions of dollars to the bottom line by focusing on data-driven planning. Over the next five years, our goal is to automate the entire supply chain by forming the right partnerships, increasing the flexibility of our solutions to adapt to different verticals, expanding to new markets, and making sales easier. We have already automated the existing demand planning process and are working on inventory management, vendor management, distribution, and logistics.

Rahul Vishwakarma, CEO & Co-founder, Mate Labs Innovations Pvt. Ltd

As an industrial engineer, I always look for optimization as my prime task in every aspect of my job. Supply chain is the broad range of activities required to plan, control and execute a product’s flow, from acquiring raw materials and production through distribution to the final customer, in the most streamlined and cost-effective way possible. This is the field where I can utilize all my skills and knowledge to make the organizational processes flawless.

Supply Chains are changing at a very fast pace and there is a lot of competition to deliver the quality products faster to the consumers. Autonomous process are now replacing the traditional approach with the support of Digitization and Artificial Intelligence. Technologies are enabling supply chain to be more visible, transparent and bringing integrity to the SC partners. What defines success is a more networkcentric, collaborative approach by network level strategy development and decision making based on business intelligence with the partners.

Mondelez Global Logistics team and the North America Business unit embarked on a journey to change the landscape of our distribution network & implement standard WM practices & SAP EWM across our network of plants, distribution centers, and direct store delivery facilities. This initiative, Project DISCO (Deliver Integrated Supply Chain Optimization), was aimed at standardizing, optimizing, & integrating processes, systems & tools to deploy futuristic WMS practices at 45+ warehouse facilities across the length & breadth of the USA. We were revamping ASRS infrastructure at the plant, implementing advanced functionalities at DCs to enable batch level tracing & setting up direct store deliveries at the Depot Warehouses. Establishing a new Route to market helped us to provide faster customer service & increase satisfaction. We were able to retire four different vendor-managed legacy WM applications. By implementing strict voice confirmed FEFO controls, we increased order servicing accuracy and reduced waste for NA by 5%. In contrast, productivity improved by 3.5% by using the labormanagement module. By implementing the Track & Trace solution, we achieved 100% traceability of finished goods at the batch code date level.

Garima Kesheorey, Production Supervisor, J&J

Divya Bhojane, Category Supply Planner, Mondelez international

Mazz Pathan, Sr. Planning & Forecasting Manager, Amazon

Pooja Shah, Manager – Supply Planner, Nestle

Arpan Garg,

Manager - Commercial Supply Chain, Viatris Inc. My interest in learning and pursuing supply chain as a career was developed when I pursued my master’s at NITIE Mumbai. I was so fascinated after learning about how the supply chain plays a critical role in transforming production into sales, linking suppliers to consumers, and bridging the gap between demand and supply. I liked this stream because it allowed me to visualize the skeleton of a business and think beyond what is visible. When I took up my first job with Landmark Group (Dubai), I led several process improvement activities, projects on supply chain analytics and drove technology transformation in the retail supply chain. This exposure helped me get a steep learning curve in the early stage of my career and enhanced my interest level. And then I never looked back. I enjoy working relentlessly every day to do something better than yesterday to drive excellence in the supply chain.

The e-commerce supply chain is a bit more complex and evolved compared to that of other industries. The simplest way to acknowledge this is that lead time for an e-commerce supply chain is tracked in minutes and hours and not in days! Every product category behaves differently and needs different treatment by the supply chain. So, when we manage 50 product categories on e-commerce, we have to run 50 different supply chains together on a single network with the highest complexity and integration between process and technology. And this complexity is going to increase further as we get more and more customers to shop online. One paradigm shift could be that the supply chain will now focus heavily on convenience & reliability and not just speed of delivery. In addition, it will be interesting to see how the omnichannel strategy of various businesses pans out in the years to come.

While I had joined Nestle as a Management Trainee, I was working on a project to drive Service Levels across Categories for Nestle India as part of the Customer Service Team. The essential starting point was to trigger visibility amongst stakeholders of potential order losses to action deployment and ensure availability to avoid stock-outs. I had worked out a tool to forecast stock-outs considering the current trend of Redistribution and Invoicing, available stocks at Distribution Centers, and factories at the Week level considering transit lead times for stock connectivity. It could indicate the potential volume of stock-outs and required dispatches. This Projected Distribution Center Out of Stock (DCOOS) tool was appreciated by all stakeholders and was successful enough to be integrated into the system by the Customer Service IT Specialist. It was launched as a Forecasted Orders report with some modifications and is used across categories within Nestle India to forecast Customer Order Fulfilment (COF) at the Week level and trigger actions. The output of the same gets presented to the SCM leadership team for forward outlook on coverage and to drive COF.

Development of an end-to-end inventory tool for examining the inventory of a particular FG in the country's warehouse to the raw material and packing material of the same lying at manufacturing plant warehouse led to analysing the overall days of end-to-end inventory. Our team came up with this idea when CMD expressed his requirement of a particular tool to examine inventory across the chain to keep the overall carrying cost in place. My contribution was of model conceptualization and designing the whole base of the tool in Excel to decide upon various measures to be embedded in the tool, which included minimization of inventory holding cost based on lead times & other factors and classifying the list of materials based on demographic supply chain along with historical data embedded for specific changes in inventory bases. The model was designed to keep track of the overall norm from FG at the country's WH to its RM/PM stored at Manufacturing WH. The same was established to control the excess materials inflowed though some excess PR/PO is generated through the Manual MRP system used for material ordering. The model helped identify and highlight excess/ shortfall inventory at various points, which helped optimize inventory and reduce overall inventory costs by approx. Rs136 crore. This helped in generating the required cash flow for the company. The model was designed to be implemented into a future application that could be linked to SAP, and thus, a live dashboard can be created for everyone in the chain to have a uniform view across.

On-time delivery is one of the critical aspects in supply chains to satisfy customer needs. One of our suppliers was facing operational challenges in delivering products on time. This also meant that there would be a potential impact on costs in the long run with increased waiting times, unreliable supply chain, potential loss of business, and credibility. To improve this situation, we partnered with the supplier to help them identify the root cause and guide them towards solutions. We built a cross-functional team and leadership buy-in from supplier and GE to conduct a Lean event at the supplier’s factory. This was a collaborative effort, and we started by collecting data for the entire wing to wing process and mapped the current state value stream. We used various lean tools such as spaghetti diagrams, capacity analysis, 7 ways, fishbone diagrams to perform gap analysis, understand root causes, try-storm, and develop kaizens. We had the supplier subject matter experts also involved from the production line in the kaizen event.

It was a systematic approach with a proper cadence to ensure all the actions and ideas were addressed. The lean event was for 4 days, but the preparation for the event took weeks. The follow-up on ideas/actions was a continuous process. Successfully, after the implementation of the ideas over a short period, the supplier started performing well. We reduced a lot of pressure on the supply chain, avoided potential quality defects and costs that may have cropped up, and improved reliability very importantly. Collaboration across the value chain is critical and is a very powerful mechanism to solve supply chain challenges.

I proudly wear the hat of expertise in managing day-to-day operations and presenting to top-level CXOs on futuristic supply chain ideas. I have 6+ years of diverse experience in the areas of consulting, retail and CPG. After my post-graduation in Supply Chain from NITIE, I have implemented my learnings from college into real-world business challenges and have led multiple key-value projects. I have implemented my learnings from college into real-world supply chain challenges. I have led numerous projects that generate business benefits for my organization, such as 10% OTIF improvement, stock freshness increase, DOH reduction, etc. I hope to make a supply chain for the organization revolving around the 4As – Algorithmic, Agile, Automated, and Anticipatory. Using my articles and whitepaper, I have tried to give back to the industry and grow. The highlighted project of my experience was the conceptualization of the Supply Chain Flow Optimization approach for effectively managing the supply chain flow from source to customer through visibility, smoothening, and optimization while overcoming constraints, disruptors, and blind spots.

We leveraged machine learning techniques to assess the current and upcoming ‘Demand vs. Supply ‘and aid in proactive hiring, cross-skilling, and upskilling of associates. With these improved insights, HR managers can also identify employees who are critical to the business, assess their risk situations, and design appropriate contingency plans.

I was involved in the business transformation, process standardization, platform implementation, and business roadmap definition across the talent delivery value chain. During this program, I worked extensively with multi-functional teams, i.e., resource management, lateral recruitment, learning & development, performance management, and business operations, for delivering large and complex transformational programs in the areas of demand fulfillment skill analytics, bench quality analytics, up-skilling, and proactive hiring process. This initiative of incorporating a self-service optimizer helped the business identify the right talent, at the right time, against the right demand. The more significant outcomes achieved were increased fill rates, higher fulfillment velocity, perfect order rates, reduced bench costs through JIT fulfilments.

Ajay Devadi, Lead Commodity Management Specialist, GE Gas Power

Aakash Varma, Manager, Dabur India

Shubhendu Roy, COE Workforce Insight Analytics, Cognizant Technology Solution

Sonakshi Jain, Category Demand and Supply Planning Manager, Nestle India

Prajakta Shinde,

Deputy Manager - CGA (Cipla Global Access) Operations Cipla Ltd. Co-packing is one of the critical activities in the coffee and foods category. To enable this, production from the factory is sent to multiple co-packer locations, which is then either packed in polybag or packed along with a free mug. Due to the high complexity of managing four different locations clubbed with the non-flexibility of vendors, we worked on consolidating the co-packers with the objective of-

Reduction of complexity: Earlier conversion to finished goods at co-packer took ~7 days, which was brought down to 4 days with this project due to higher efficiency. We also initiated direct dispatch from the co-packer. It went from 0% to 60% within three months, reducing time to market, thereby improving freshness.

Maintain quality and hygiene standards: With the consolidated space, the inventory management practices were better. The process of co-packing was also streamlined, leading to a reduction in consumer complaints.

Capacity expansion:

a. Setup requirements: Several factors accounted for capacity working – total space, workforce requirements, loading/unloading bays, machine, stacker requirement, etc.

b. Service requirements: Adhering to Nestle controls, implementing good warehousing practices and stock management, ensuring operational safety, compliance with HR policies, etc.

Cost rationalization: With the help of consolidation, we could save 0.4mio/year on transportation to different co-packer locations. We also saved 0.62mio/year by dispatching directly from the co-packer.

Our most significant innovation involved reducing the failure to supply penalties for the MTS market by 92% against the previous financial year. This feat was achieved within 7 months from the initiation of the project. All high-volume, low-value products were identified from the products list and shifted to another plant to increase the focus of the first plant on low-volume, high-value products. Earlier, their focus was to produce high volumes. Due to the analysis, these volumes drastically decreased by 50% at the first plant, and that at another plant increased by 30% (as compared to the previous monthly average). This helped in preventing inventory dumping, and the availability of desired products improved in the market. It also highlighted hidden issues (API shortage, imprinting issues, yield issues, etc.), which were masked due to higher volume production. We alerted the stakeholders about upcoming backorders/ low coverage products for necessary action. As per inventory norms, we prioritized the demand to curtail demand for high inventory products and ensure the right SKUs were supplied.

We also identified single-source products and collaborated with the procurement team to develop alternate vendors to reduce dependency. Weekly meetings were conducted with country managers and planners to discuss the current month's and next month's supply as per the 'Net Product Requirement (NPR).' Also, fortnightly meetings were conducted to examine the next 3 – 6 months' supply plan, understand new orders, and do backward integration for timely supply as per the lead time.

Complete automation of the process was done at the end; live dashboards reflected the status of supply and upcoming backorder/low coverage products. Autoalerts/reminders were set to respective stakeholders to expedite their action plan. In addition, 'FTS Penalty data' was analyzed every month to identify high penalty items and customers/distributors, calculate the net requirement and ensure supply within the lead time. We constantly monitored the freight cost and devised a mechanism for selecting shipment mode (Air/Sea).

I curated 11 Supplier Regional Committees for 200+ direct suppliers of Honda Cars to ensure the industrial risk in every supplier cluster is significantly reduced. This required creation of an administrative model that sustains itself. I created this model and ensured that every organization's plant head, and IR head collaborated and worked with all the suppliers in the region to ensure peace and harmony. This was needed to ensure that no strike, lockdown, or protests disrupted part production and suppliers to customers/OEMs. Following the concept of Collaborative Independence, a culture was fostered to pool investments for CSR, create a benchmark for organizational development policies, form a coalition for government negotiations, and share best practices. Besides setting up the model for these committees, I attended monthly meetings in each region to ensure smooth flow, published a handbook of best practices, created a self-audit mechanism, and created a system of reward and recognition to motivate all the supplier partners. This required collaboration with 33 office bearers of regional committees, 200+ professionals representing each supplier partner, managing directors, plant heads, and HR/IR heads of every supplier partner. Some tangible results included Zero IR Incident reporting in three regions for two consecutive years, effective negotiation with local governing bodies for three local incidents, and launching a task force that handled contingency.

Rashmeet Kaur, Supply Chain Consultant, Thoucentric

Greater growth, profits and a reimagined customer experience starts with your supply chain.

Today’s customer journey is dynamic and challenging, yet full of opportunity. With Blue Yonder, you get an intelligent, digital supply chain platform that delivers dynamic commerce experiences from beginning to end. One platform that helps you predict potential disruptions, find growth opportunities, and optimize inventory replenishment to deliver every time — no matter what the future holds.