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One day IIT-B and NITIE workshop on NITIE and IIT Bombay in conjunction with Operations Research Society of India organized a one-day workshop on "OR Modeling in Supply Chain Management" on 22nd February 2003 at the NITIE auditorium. Background: With domestic and international competition intensifying, many existing business ideas and strategies have become obsolete. It is natural then, to find the corporate world searching for strategies that can enforce their competitive position. A new set of operational management practices have now emerged to overcome difficulties in parts and products procurement and distribution in the industry. IT and Operations Research methods form the core of these practices. Dubbed the Supply Chain Management, this approach coordinates the planning and management of supply and demand; acquiring materials; producing and scheduling the product or service; inventory control, distribution; delivery and customer service. Speakers:
Dr. T. R. Natesan from Anna University presented a paper on "Distributed Counseling - A Mathematical model for Optimal Allocation of Candidates." The paper tried to bring about a solution to the problem of allotment of candidates to colleges in various branches, during the selection process of engineering colleges of Tamil Nadu. The paper developed a mathematical model for managing distributed counseling through single window system. The problem was abstracted as a transportation model, finally reduced to a smaller size to save computational effort. The objective of the study was to make every candidate to commute the least distance from the hometown to the counseling center. The developed model had been solved for optimal allocation of candidates hailing from several districts to six counseling centers. After implementation of Distributed counseling, the average distance traveled has reduced considerably. Now, using the solution of the model, candidates are also given guidance to choose the nearest center. The second paper was presented by Mr. Makarand Kulkarni of Syntel (India) Ltd, Mumbai. His paper related to a study carried out to optimize the core segment of the supply chain associated with continuous Casting industries. A typical supply chain of continuous casting systems consists of the source (raw materials), the inbound logistics of the raw materials, the casting process, outbound logistics of the finished products. Several attempts have been made to optimize the core segment, ie, the casting system. One such attempt has been through Simulated Annealing, the essence of which was presented in the paper. There were two sub-systems of this method, a process simulation sub-system and product quality management sub-system. The results obtained clearly revealed how the core segment of the supply chain under consideration can be optimized. Dr. Hirji Nagarwalla, the Consultant from Mumbai, highlighted the Application of Linear and Mixed Integer Programming in Supply Chain Management. He said that this has been enabled by the various software for Supply Chain Management, like ERP which can provide large amount of accurate and timely data. In the context of the Indian industry, he gave the example of Indian Oil Corporation which developed a program called CRISplan in mid-80s, which is used even today to plan the distribution of petroleum, products across the country. On the future of Optimizing techniques, Mr. Nagarwalla was confident that authors of Supply-Chain-optimization software would upgrade their programs to make them more flexible and easy to use. Improvements in hardware technologies & algorithms would make it further easier to solve large problems. While a good measure of the value of any organization is got from the value of its assets, its worth is reflected by its ability to utilize its assets. This was the area of presentation of Mr. Siddhartha Sen Gupta from Tata Infotech Ltd. He discussed the formulation of the problem of Optimization, the core technique driving Strategic applications designed to ensure higher profits and competitive growth. The new techniques have evolved from the disciplines of Artificial Intelligence - Constraint Programming (CP) and Expert Systems (ES). He gave the examples of Konkan Railway's Real-time scheduling & off-line planning application developed by Tata Infotech. He also discussed the Planning & Scheduling of Tanker movements for Oil Coordination Committee, India. The presentation also described Tools based on CP and ES and the discussed the shortcomings of current implementations and open areas of future investigations. Mr. Vishnu Subash from Syntel India Ltd. presented an Integrated System of Decision Models to manage Supply Chains. As part of a project to study IT applications for Supply Chain Management, a framework called Logistics Application Integration (LAI), which derives its philosophy from Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has been developed. Logistics Function Deployment (LFD) in the matrix form is the core of the LAI. Mr. Subash explained the test application, which was developed for one of India's premier Pharma companies. Using this example, he explained how the various tasks were executed in steps and how the integrated system was developed. The last presenter of the day, an SCM Consultant, Dr. Sameer Mokashi presented a case study from the fast food industry to explain the application of optimization to Production Planning. The talk explored the potential for optimizing product volumes and manufacturing capabilities at various plants and shipping the intermediate products to other plants for production of down-stream products. A large number of what-if scenarios were examined and their optimal solutions were examined for sensitivity to market prices of intermediate meat products and variation in demand. This study has provided the accountants and operations people with visibility of costs and inefficiencies in their respective systems. It has also enabled the purchasing officer to formulate a strategy involving a sequence of changes. |
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