Operations & IT Articles

In a marketing scenario, a conversation can be either among customers or between a brand and its present or future customers. Like any conversation, there are some rules of engagement which determine what is acceptable and what’s not.

What is the first thing that would have come to our mind when we thought about the E-commerce industry during the first decade of the 21st century? Probably Ebay.in or Amazon.in would have been the websites that a normal Indian would have thought of. The Indian E-commerce industry was still naïve and under development for most part of the previous decade. But the last four years have taken the entire world and the internet by storm. This booming industry has been a witness to a growth figure of almost 233%, increasing from a mere 3 billion USD in 2010 to a mind boggling amount of 10 billion USD in 2014. Several new business models have been cropping up from all over the country and it’s due to the technological advancements of the 21st century that such B2B and B2C models are being brought into the picture.

Competitive Advantage is all about how your organization is being different from your competitor. Firms these days, whether small or large, new age companies like Amazon, Ola or age old Firms like the Tatas, the Godrejs or Maruti, they all want to gain competitive advantage. Firms can gain competitive advantage through many ways, be it Cost leadership, catering to niche markets. With the advent of Digital age, even digital technology has been used in almost every field to harness its power to gain advantage.

Supply chain management has been historically viewed as a process wherein raw materials are transformed into finished goods and then delivered to consumer. However, in the past few years, the emissions and the waste generated by the traditional supply chains have reached unendurable levels and have become one of the major causes of grievous environmental problems, such as acid rains and global warming. As a result, the need for environmental sustenance has been gaining intensity among the prevalent business practices. In view of the above developments, "Green Supply Chain Management" (GSCM) has managed to seize the raising interest among practitioners and researchers of operations and supply chain management. GSCM covers all stages of a product's life cycle from the planning, production, and distribution phases to the use of goods by the end users and its disposal at the end of product's life cycle. GSCM involves the integration of environmental thinking into supply chain management (SCM). It is an approach that targets the overall optimization of information flows and material flows along the value chain.

Statistics 1

1. 70 % of the banking executives worldwide consider customer-centricity to be of vital importance.

2. More than 60% of financial institutions across the whole of North America believe that “Big data analytics” can offer a significant competitive advantage.

3. 90% of the people believe that successful “Big data” initiatives are going to decide the winners in the future.

With a plan to develop 100 smart cities, India is all set to usher into an era of rapid development. But India’s other towns and cities also need to be developed. And the best way forward for both new smart cities and old Indian towns and cities is Clean Development. In 1992, when United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was extended, participating countries signed a treaty called Kyoto Protocol, there were two major issues: (a) Global Warming and (b) man-made CO2 emission. Clean development then came as a tool to reduce carbon footprints.