Sep 04, 2016

SPJIMR- POMS Conference: A New Milestone

Sajeev Abraham George

Moving from the era of mass production to mass customisation, coupled with emergence of the service economy have made today’s supply chains extremely complex. How to provide superior customer experience as well as achieve better efficiency in this highly complex environment is the key challenge faced by supply chain managers all over the world.

Though operations research and other analytical tools were used by companies for decades to help improve supply chain performance, new developments in IT, social media and analytics have changed the way it works for today’s supply chains. These so called big data analytics tools are beginning to have the capabilities to analyse large volumes of even unstructured data in real time to derive useful insights that help companies to respond quickly to the changing needs of the customers. However, though big data and analytics have become the latest buzzword, there is still not enough evidence to suggest that the huge investments by companies in this initiatives are actually helping them to achieve the desired objectives.

At SPJIMR, we thought it would be relevant to organise a conference to provide a platform for leading academicians, researchers and practitioners from both India and abroad to come together to share new ideas and to deliberate on this theme. The conference was also an extension to the ongoing work in the area of big data analytics at SPJIMR.

The great success of a conference of this scope of and size, which is the first of its kind at SPJIMR, is the result of the collaborative effort of a number of organisations. SPJIMR partnering with the prestigious Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), proved to be mutually beneficial. We had POMS worldwide, POMS India Chapter, Michigan State University, NITIE and IIT Bombay getting actively involved. Another unique thing was that the planning and execution of this conference happened at a very fast pace. While the planning lead time of an international conference of this level is normally more than a year, the SPJIMR POMS India Chapter conference was conceptualized in late February this year and the call for papers came out only in April. In spite of this, we got an overwhelming response from both the research and practitioner communities. We received 102 submissions, accepted 95 and had more than 100 registered delegates at the conference which included several academicians from the US.

We were also delighted by the response of a good number of practising managers and therefore had a dedicated track for the industry practitioners. The research papers were presented at the conference in six parallel tracks. The plenary sessions of the conference included keynote addresses by renowned academicians and high quality panel discussions by senior academicians and leading industry practitioners. The conference also provided ample opportunities for networking for the delegates.

SPJIMR- India Chapter Conference is a new milestone for SPJIMR and we indeed feel proud to have set some new standards.

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