Book Review Competition: The Toyota Way

Among the various exciting events in Equinox ’12, the OPEP club, on 6^th March, organized Critique, a book review competition for the international bestseller “The Toyota Way” authored by Dr. Jeffrey Liker. The participation was overwhelming as students from various reputed B-schools across the country sent their entries soon after the organizers invited them over a month back.

Among the many entries received, the best three were shortlisted and the students were invited to present their book reviews at IIM Raipur Campus in the presence of a judging panel and the students participating in Equinox ‘12. The members of the panel were Prof. O. S. Vaidya, Faculty of Operations & Supply Chain Management, IIM Raipur and Prof. Naval Bajpai, Faculty of Statistics and Business Research, IIM Raipur.

The finalists presented their understanding of and views about the wide and often less understood subject called “Lean Practices”. The basic fundamental ideas presented in the book were discussed at length. The final results of the competition are as follows:

• First Position – Akshay Agarwal, PGP 2011-2013
• Runners up – Harish Verma, PGP 2011-2013 and Mehul Bardia, PGP 2011-2013 (Jointly share runners up position)

The winning entry will be published in the forthcoming edition of Strive magazine. The book review presentations of Harish and Mehul are given below.

Book Review: The Toyota Way by Harish Verma

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Book Review: The Toyota Way by Mehul Bardia

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IIM Raipur Students Interact with Core Industries at National Expo - 3

The students of Indian Institute of Management Raipur had interactions aimed at knowledge-exchange with the entrepreneurs and representatives of the micro, small scale and medium scale enterprises (MSMEs) who participated in the National Expo 3. The expo was organized at Science College Ground in Raipur under the banner of Indore Infoline Pvt. Ltd. from 16^th December to 18^th December, 2011.

National Expo 3 is the largest industry exhibition in central India. Almost 200 companies from core sectors like steel, power, cement, mining, infrastructure, construction and automation participated in the event. The list includes Siemens Ltd., Wendt (India) Ltd., Doshion Ltd., Atlas Copco India Ltd. and many small scale and medium scale enterprises. Moreover, some foreign companies, mainly from China and Singapore, were also present. This exhibition provided them an opportunity to display their products and technology and to interact with potential customers. It also proved to be a very useful platform for some budding companies and new products as they got significant exposure.

The students of IIM Raipur took up this opportunity and attended the National Expo 3 with the sole intention of learning through interactions with the local industries. Chhattisgarh is well known for its Core Industries and we experienced it first-hand while talking to the representatives of the various start-ups who also were participating. Many of the students have some prior experience in the core sectors like steel, power, mining, construction etc. This further added to the quality and fruitfulness of the interactions as they could easily connect with the industry representatives and understand their problems and practices. We learnt about their technology, logistics, markets, competition and management practices. They also shared with us the problems that they confront while setting up or expanding business in Chhattisgarh as well as those that come up in day-to-day operations. The discussions then went on towards the possible solutions, where we tried to complement their experience with our classroom learning. Finally, we talked about the likely future scenario of industries in Chhattisgarh, and found that almost everyone seemed quite optimistic. We also explored opportunities for making the Expo a bigger success by researching into dimensions like Logistics, Layout, Customer Satisfaction, Branding etc.

In a nutshell, the National Expo 3 proved to be a great learning experience for IIM Raipur students and we look forward to participate in and contribute to such events in the future.

The writer of this article, Abhay Shankar is a PGP student of Indian Institute of Management, Raipur and has done his B. Tech (Chemical Engineering) from BIT Sindri. Prior to joining IIM Raipur, Abhay was working at Vedanta Aluminium Ltd. Abhay can be reached at pgp11001.abhay@iimraipur.ac.in

P&G To Produce Locally

Though Procter and Gamble (P&G) is a world leader in FMCG, its market share in developing countries like India, China, Vietnam, Brazil etc. is meager in comparison to that of its archrival, Unilever. It is always anticipated that P&G will come out with a strategy which will make its products more affordable and competitive in the developing countries than its competitors. The recent decision of the company to stop the imports of major chunk of its products in India and to manufacture these products in India itself is one such step towards the goal mentioned above.

                                               

Till now, P&G imports most of its premium products manufactured in other countries to India for sale. The imports add an additional overhead to its products which put them on an unaffordable premium product shelves. The decision of P&G is to invest Rs. 700 crores to enhance the production capacity of P&G firms in India so that they can cater to the demands of its products and distribute them through its 1.3 million outlets across the country.

The localized production will help P&G in many ways. Firstly, it will save huge amounts of duties that it has to pay to the Government of India for importing its products. Secondly, the availability of large workforce at low price will further reduce the cost of production and will maximize the profits. Thirdly, it will also protect P&G from the fluctuation in the foreign exchange markets. It is obvious that when the currency of a country depreciates, it is the importers who have to bear the maximum loss as they could import only few items with the given amount in comparison to when currency appreciates. Fourthly, India has signed free trade agreements with many countries in Asia and Africa. P&G can take advantage of this to pump its products manufactured in India to these countries without any difficulties. In addition, it will also make P&G's Supply Chain more responsive by reducing the lead time for replenishment. As a result of which, the different elements of the Supply Chain i.e. retailers, dealers, manufacturer, suppliers etc. will have to maintain lower inventory levels, thus reducing inventory holding cost. All these factors will help in increasing the market share of P&G which in turn will improve its revenues.

But the biggest challenge for P&G would be to maintain the quality standards. Even the slightest degradation in the quality of its products might severely hurt its entire market shares in India. Moreover, it is a general perception among the Indian consumers that the imported products are better in quality. It would be a challenge for P&G to change this perception of the general Indian consumers.

No doubt that P&G has made a well calculated move by deciding to enhance the production of its premium and mass premium products in India. Whether it is going to be successful or not remains to be seen.

Reference

Article “P&G Plans Big Move, to Make More Locally” by Mr. Sagar Malviya in The Economic Times dated 14^th November 2011

The writer of this article, Abhay Shankar is a PGP student of Indian Institute of Management, Raipur and has done his B. Tech (Chemical Engineering) from BIT Sindri. Prior to joining IIM Raipur, Abhay was working at Vedanta Aluminium Ltd. Abhay can be reached at pgp11001.abhay@iimraipur.ac.in