VGSoM student credits School’s Curricula for her PAN-India business competition Win
Kharagpur: Amrutha Bhamidimukkula, final year student of the Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur, gave her college, which is celebrating its silver jubilee, another cause for celebration. She won the Best B-School Project Award 2017 organized by Business Standard for her supply chain optimization project for Domino’s Pizza.
Amrutha thanks her training at VGSoM for her success. “Apart from good performance in academics and internship, soft skills play an important role such as presentation skills, effective communication,” she says Amrutha recalls strengthening these skills from her participation in the extra-curricular activities at VGSoM starting from debates, competitions, quizzes, dance, drama etc. She also emphasized on Electives, especially practical application-oriented, which are critical in managing industry projects. Her training in supply chain management supported by data analytics contribute significantly to her win competing with students from top management schools in India.
VGSoM, in fact, has a unique curriculum that lays great stress on data analytics and supply chain management for its MBA students.
Prof. Prabina Rajib, Dean of VGSoM says, “Our focus is to groom future managers with strong skills in data analytics, which is why we have introduced six analytics-focused electives. We have Supply Chain Analytics, Business Accounting & Investment Analytics, Banking & Financial Markets Analytics, Introduction to Business Analytics, Advance Business Analytics, Digital Marketing and as our new electives.”
She adds that the school also offers new-age electives like Commodity Derivatives & Risk Management, Marketing and Finance in Oil Sector, Women Leaders in Management, Ethics in Engineering Practice, Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility in Multinational Context etc.
The Business Standard Best B-School Project 2017 was a tough competition, which had a jury that comprised some of the best business leaders in the country.
“The main objective was to find more cost-effective and efficient ways of ordering and transporting,” says Amrutha. She suggested four ways to bring changes to the company’s existing operations that would reduce transportation costs and increase warehouse efficiency.
Bhamidimukkula worked on the project for Jubilant FoodWorks. For one, she suggested that the pizza company had its outlets segregate their orders as ‘dry’ and ‘chilled’ items.
The second suggestion followed from the first. Since the dry items were required in lesser volumes, the company could send out the dry items in unrefrigerated trucks once in 10 or 15 days, with the trucks carrying larger quantities of dry items. That would improve the trucks’ utilization and reduce the number of trips.
Three, she suggested that the outlets in any particular area synchronize their orders so that multiple truck trips could be avoided.
Four, she suggested that the company monitors the temperature in the cold chain more accurately to better preserve the food quality.