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Confluence 2003 Highlights of Day 2, Confluence 2003 Talk by Mr. Sushil Premchand, Kavach (PRS Permacel Pvt. Ltd.) Mr. Premchand, in his talk, emphasized the need to push marketing without putting any physical, geographical, cultural or psychological barriers. He shared his experiences in dealing with cross-cultural scenarios and shared his intricate knowledge of mixing European and Asian business cultures. He said that holistic customer solutions need to be found and five layers of customer service. Towards this end, he introduced the unique product called Kavach for brand protection. Kavach is India's first fully integrated approach to address brand attack and resultant damage to corporate reputation. Talk by Mr. Govind Shankaranarayanan, Head of Business Finance, Planning and Strategy at VSNL Mr. Shankaranarayanan talked about "VSNL and Tetley: A tale of two acquisitions". He covered various aspects about the two acquisitions, which he compared and contrasted. He covered financial, strategic, operational and marketing learning related to the two 'model' acquisitions. He also addressed cultural issues related to mergers which he said were critical to their success. Stratosphere - Strategy Case Finals The case that teams presented on was one of Casper, a new entrant inn the Telecom sector and a niche player. They had to recommend a strategy for the firm to enable it to compete successfully with Fresco Systems, a big market player in the infrastructure provision side Telecom (Market share 80%).
The team from IIMC won the day with a brilliant performance, which encompassed the essential requirements of analyzing this case - a thorough study of current products and technology before approaching the case.
Technocrat
The topic for the paper was 'Leveraging IT in post-disaster recovery management'. The judges judged teams on the basis of three parameters : - The team from IIMA with Chhavi Moodgal and Amit Srivastava won the honours at the end with a comprehensive coverage of different technologies and a general framework, which could be used in any situation; they successfully used the case of the San Fransisco earthquake of 1989 to illustrate their analysis.
One of the judges was Mr. Mihir Bhat from the Disaster Management Institute. The topic itself was a live one, and the approaches used were fresh, with innovative thinking.
Opulence - The Operations Game Teams were made to play a game revolving around the airline industry - they given virtual cash and resources, a list of available aircraft, and information on costs, fuel prices, depreciation rates, and the routes available to fly on. The objective was simply profit maximization, and the decision variables were fare, route and the type of aircraft that would be bought. Speaking to the organizers and a participant, they felt that the game was very competitive, not technical or biased towards anyone from any kind of technical background. It tested pure logical and lateral thinking, and minimized the benefits of instinctive reactions. The key to success was correct interpretation of the variables to stress on since there were too many to consider equally.
Final results for Opulence Game
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