Industry Projects

Robust Global Sourcing Networks (with GM ISL)

Global firms adopt integrated management strategies, which blurs the national borders and treat the set of factories from different countries as a part of the same supply chain network. Sourcing is one such integrated strategy that is subject to deviations like exchange rate fluctuations, demand-supply uncertainties, and disruptions like supplier failures, transportation link failure, and factory shutdowns. In this collaborative research with GM ISL, we developed robust optimisation based methodology that can be used by procurement managers to design a global sourcing network, which is robust under a wide range of pre-identified deviations and disruptions. Our numerical experiments showed by investing 10-15% more in redundancy can prevent devastative losses of more than 100%.

Interaction Network Analysis (with IBM IRL)

GLAMS and IBM India Research Laboratory are conducting an Open Collaborative Research on Services Science, Management, and Engineering. This is the first of its kind by IBM in India. Services are the largest part of the economy of developed countries and fastest growing sectors in developing countries. One of the distinguishing features of the service sector is high emphasis on people interacting with people and serving the customer rather than transforming physical goods in the process. Hence, people to people interaction is pervasive in services industry and can be analysed for diagnostic and optimisation purposes. Analysis of interaction networks extracted from the service operations is the focus of this joint research. This has applications in redesigning the organisation structure, designing optimal workflows, reducing attrition, and also helps the key groups in moving up the value chain. The research draws upon multi-disciplinary expertise in varying fields such as Social Network Analysis, Graph Theory, Matrix Theory, Data Mining, Simulation, and Machine Learning.

Globalising Indian Auto Component Industry (with ACMA)

Indian auto industry is an inflection point. There are attempts to make India an auto components hub, small car hub, export hub etc. There are two issues which are important that need consideration: 1) training of the top managements regarding the supply chain efficiencies and 2) best practices to reduce the costs particularly in the outbound logistics sector. GLAMS will be addressing the above issues for the auto industry in partnership with Automotive Components Manufacturing Association (ACMA). There will be two executive programmes - one for the CEOs/Heads on Strategy and Leadership followed by another programme for senior management on implementation of strategy and designing implementation frameworks.