The specialisation in Operations provides the students an opportunity to pursue their academic interests in the Area of Operations/Supply Chain Management (SCM). The area focuses on designing, operating, and improving the productive systems—the systems that produce and deliver products and/or services. Organizations perform transformational processes of various types, for example, physical (as in manufacturing), locational (as in transportation or warehousing), exchange (as in retailing), etc. The specialisation enables participants to ensure that these transformation processes are performed efficiently and that the output is of greater value than the sum of the inputs.
The operations major specialisation focuses on the two very broad disciplines of (a) Supply Chain Management (SCM) and (b) Project Management. The three courses related to Supply Chain Management area have been designed to develop capabilities to manage the flow of goods, services, and information through the supply chain in an integrated manner in order to make the chain responsive to customer needs while lowering total costs. The Project Management course, on the other hand, focuses on developing capabilities to plan and control large projects within the resource and budget constraints while keeping them on schedule.
The career opportunities for the operations majors start with the positions of purchasing managers, plant/production manager, logistics managers, warehouse managers, distribution center manager, business process improvement analyst, project manager, hospital administrators, branch manager (in a bank), etc. The participants can hope to rise rapidly to the positions like chief operating officer and chief supply chain officer in large multinationals.
In this specialization the students are exposed to a wide range of core courses through which they achieve a holistic learning of Business administration while focusing on an in-depth study of Operations/SCM through the major. Throughout the specialisation a strategic application perspective has been incorporated and emphasized to provide the students with both a conceptual foundation along with an exposure to real life business scenarios. Hands-on training on various modules of an ERP system further enhances learning; and makes students ready to be productive from day one in the corporate world.
Along with advanced courses in Operations, capstone courses in Business Management like corporate governance, Ethics, Business Strategy are also offered to develop a holistic and an integrated view of business, its ethical aspects and its effective governance. Along with electives in Business management, a project in the area of Operations domain can be undertaken which can provide the students with exposure to real life applications in the domain and an overall understanding of the work environment.
SPECIALIZATION AIMS
The Operations Specialisation intends to:
- Demonstrate basic knowledge in accounting, economics, finance, management, Entrepreneurship, and marketing in application of concepts and theories.
- Integrate the concepts of the core areas of business and apply it in various contexts.
- Understand the importance of ethics in business activities.
- Provide an in-depth understanding of the strategic importance of operations and supply chain management in a global business environment.
- Provide in-depth understanding of how an operations function relates to and impacts other business functions.
- Impart the ability to conceptualize how systems are interrelated, organize activities effectively, analyze processes critically, make decisions based on data, and push for continual process improvement.
- Make participants understand the overall structures of different types of supply chains and how they are managed.
- Make participants understand the procurement cycle, manufacturing cycle, replenishment cycle, and customer order cycle in detail.
- Provide in-depth understanding of warehousing, material handling, logistical packaging and transportation.
- Impart knowledge and skills to conceive, select, plan and implement projects in a systematic way.
MAJOR OUTCOMES AND MINOR OUTCOMES
After successful completion of the Major, the student will be able to:
- Develop a sound understanding of how the operations function is integrated with other organisational functions
- To provide students with an appreciation of the operations function of an organisation
- Develop an integrated approach to understand and drive sustainable growth in the long run.
- To demonstrate how tools and techniques within the operations function improve organisational effectiveness and efficiency
- To equip students with concepts, frameworks, and models to improve organisational effectiveness
- Demonstrate the technical skills required for solving business problems, including using relevant tools/platforms and commercial programming languages
- Identify and apply knowledge acquired in the classroom on different domains such as supply chain, finance, marketing and human resources
- Articulate research ideas from futuristic topics such as artificial intelligence, machine learning etc.,
MAJOR OUTCOMES AND MINOR OUTCOMES
After successful completion of the Minor, the student will be able to:
- Develop a sound understanding of how the operations function is integrated with other organisational functions
- To provide students with an appreciation of the operations function of an organisation
- To demonstrate how tools and techniques within the operations function improve organisational effectiveness and efficiency
- To equip students with concepts, frameworks, and models to improve organisational effectiveness
COURSES (CORE AND ELECTIVE)
31 MAJOR COURSES
| Introduction to Operations Research | Research Methods for Managers | Business Applications of Analytics |
| Introduction to Finance and Accounting | Financial Management | Project Management |
| Consumer & Markets | Operations Management | Data Analytics Services |
| Introduction to People Management | Supply Chain Management | E-Commerce * |
| Introduction to Entrepreneurship & Family Business | Design Thinking for Managers | Enterprise Data Management * |
| Introduction to Spreadsheet Modeling | Business Ethics and Corporate Governance | Production Planning & Control * |
| Introduction to Quantitative Methods | Supply Chain Design and Sourcing | Advanced Supply Chain Management * |
| Managerial Economics | Logistics Management | Lean Concepts for Managers * |
| Accounting for Managers | Advanced Operations Research | Production Planning and Control * |
| Marketing Management | Negotiations | |
| Organisational Behaviour | Business Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy |
* 4th year undergraduate courses
Introduction to operations research
The course exposes students to fundamental optimization procedures and techniques to attain skills at structuring business problems and modelling them as a mathematical program, microsoft excel to solve such models, interpret solutions and use the solutions to answer the business problem. The focus of this course will be on applications of quantitative methods in modelling business situations.
introduction to finance and accounting
The course is aimed at baptizing the students to the vocabularies of accounting theories and practices. Beginning with the accounting concepts, introducing the basic tenets in maintaining the books of accounts, the course finally culminates into the preparation of the financial statements like income statement, balance sheet as well as the cash flow statement. It also covers the bank reconciliation statement and bills of exchange.
Consumers and markets
This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the various dimensions of marketing as a discipline. It focuses on exploring various aspects of marketing, markets, consumers, their shopping behaviour and motivations. It gives broad understanding of the exciting world of shop, shopping and shopper.
Introduction to people management
This course introduces the basic context, concepts and importance of people management in organizations to students. It incorporates application of psychological and sociological concepts to provide understanding about how people work in organizations. The course familiarizes students with the fundamental ideas of organizational behavior and human resource management and prepares them for the advanced courses under the specialisation. It is designed as an essential first course for students of management and entrepreneurship, to familiarise them with the practices of managing people in organizations.
Introduction to entrepreneurship & family business
This course introduces students to entrepreneurship and family businesses. It provides an overview on how they come into being, their perspective on the ecosystem, their mindset and how they manage their enterprises.
Introduction to spreadsheet modelling
This course deals with the use of the spreadsheet to solve managerial problems. It merely highlights the use of microsoft excel as an aid in formulating business problems and invoking appropriate functions to resolve them.
Introduction to quantitative methods
This course is designed to give undergraduate students an introduction to decision making. The use of quantitative techniques is increasingly being adopted in all areas of human endeavour. The need to collect, analyze and interpret mathematical output is increasingly being appreciated for arriving at conclusions or in strategic decision making. This course will deal with fundamental concepts required to model, analyse and solve quantitative problems arising in any discipline. A student undertaking this course can have little to no formal introduction to mathematics and statistics at the higher secondary level.
Managerial economics
This course provides a foundation of economic theories and models for use in managerial decision-making. The course provides students with an overview of theories of demand, supply, production and competition and equips them with the tools and techniques to make effective economic decisions under different business environments.
Accounting for managers
Financial accounting provides the means of recording and reporting financial information in a business. Accounting plays a vital role as an information system for monitoring, problem solving and decision-making. This course provides the fundamentals of financial accounting and goes on to demonstrate how accounting fits into the overall business environment of an organization. In addition to this, management accounting systems, which have a strong internal focus can be effective tools in providing information that is useful in decision making at all levels in the organization. Management accountants play a strategic role in developing and providing both financial and non-financial information that is critical to the success of an organization.
Marketing management
This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the function of marketing in an organization. The course helps students to apply the marketing concepts and theories to solve case studies and projects. The course makes them vigilant of the marketing happenings in the real world and therefore importance of creating effective marketing strategies.
Organisational behavior
This course is an introduction to organizational behaviour for undergraduates. It discusses behaviour in organizations at individual, group & organizational levels and provides an understanding of the underlying aspects that drive behavior. It provides insights into the different theories and their application in the organizational context. It also enables students to understand the utilisation of different tools and practices in directing individual actions towards organizational objectives.
Research methods in management
The objective of the course is to enable students to understand the role and importance of research in improving managerial decisions when faced with uncertainty. Research methods are applied in all functional areas of business viz. Operation management, accounting, finance and marketing. The issue facing managers is not a shortage of information but how to use the available information to make better decisions. Learning this course helps students recognise that data are inherently variable and that the identification measurement, control, and reduction of variation provide opportunities for quality improvement.
Financial management
This course in financial management provides a detailed understanding of the finance function and its interrelationship with other areas of business. It seeks to develop the foundation for financial management concepts. It primarily helps the student to understand how businesses make investment, financing, working capital management and dividend decisions and what are the key factors that influence these decisions.
Design thinking for managers
Design thinking (dt) is a powerful tool to tackle the unstructured & the unknown. Dt is a ‘human centered’ approach to problem solving which emerged at stanford in the 1960’s primarily as a systematic, immersive approach to product design. In recent years, it was found that these approaches can be extended to a wide category of ill-structured, real-world problems, both in emerging and developed markets alike. Dt is getting increasingly popular not only across top corporates, but also in rural, semi-urban and underserved sections of society. Given the diversity of challenges that we face today, it therefore becomes necessary to have thinkers and doers who can focus on addressing such challenges. Dt helps in building those capabilities.
Business ethics and corporate governance
The course aims to develop in the student a clear perspective on the role and responsibilities of business in society. It helps the student understand the role of ethics in business. It also dwells on corporate governance frameworks and their relevance to contemporary business environment.
Business innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy
The course is designed to expose the student to innovation and its application in entrepreneurship. Today it is the use of innovation in entrepreneurship that makes companies to sustain and pose a threat for competitors. This course will enable students to understand the dynamic nature of the environment and the need for being innovative. In this course, the emphasis is not on filling in frameworks. On the contrary, students will be taught to exhibit unconventional thinking and link it to entrepreneurship. The practical and interwoven theoretical nature of class deliberations will cull out the deeper understanding of entrepreneurship. This course enables a student to understand the role of innovation at different fronts such as product, process, business model etc.
Logistics management
The Logistics Management course will help the participants understand how logistics is managed in the modern global supply chains on the inbound and outbound sides; and what techniques are employed to make supply chains lean and efficient. Industrial packaging (unitizarion, palletization, and containerization), and all of the modes of transportation (rail, road, marine, and air) are covered in detail. Logistics documentation for national and international trade are also studied. Other topics covered in the course include warehousing, inventory management, and logistics service providers.
Supply chain management
The Supply Chain Management (SCM) course helps participants understand the key concepts, strategies, tools, and technologies related to Supply Chain Management. The overall structures of different types of supply chains and the techniques used to manage them are covered in adequate detail. The four supply chain cycles, namely the procurement cycle, manufacturing cycle, replenishment cycle and customer order cycle, are included to give a wholistic picture of the business operations.
Supply chain design and sourcing
The Supply Chain Design and Sourcing (SCDS) course focuses on the key concepts, tools, and technologies related to supply chain strategy formulation, strategic sourcing, and advanced supply management (purchasing). The course is designed to help participants understand the linkages between the competitive strategy of the firm and the supply chain strategy. The techniques used to mass customize products for the end consumer are covered in great detail. The purchasing process, strategic sourcing, and portfolio approach to sourcing are also included.
Enterprise systems
The Enterprise Systems (ES) course is designed to familiarize the participants with the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that are now universally used by business organizations to run their transactions and generate various reports. The course helps students understand the cross-functional nature of business processes and their relationship to organizational areas. The participants can familiarize themselves with the key business processes through hands-on experience on the latest version of one of the enterprise resources planning packages. Detailed case studies and exercises are included.
Project management
The Project Management course helps students understand how the large-scale projects are conceptualized, planned and executed in a systematic way. The course covers the generation and screening of project ideas, assessment of techno-economic feasibility of the projects, project appraisal techniques, project financing (including infrastructure finance), project planning and control using network techniques (PERT and CPM), cost control and quality control, crashing of activities for optimising project costs vis-a-vis project schedule, computerized project management (using Microsoft Project), and risk management for projects.
Production planning & control
The main objective of this course is to make the students familiar with how production planning is done in large manufacturing organizations using ERP and SCM software packages. The students will learn the basic framework of Production Planning & Control processes, Master Production Scheduling and Material Requirements Planning, MRP Outputs, Order Release and Order Management Processes. The topics covered include: Overview of Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP-II), Strategic and Business Planning and Resource Requirements Planning; Sales and Operations Planning; Demand Management; Material Requirements Planning Procedure; MRP-I Outputs and the Order Management Process.
Advanced supply chain management
This course covers advanced topics in SCM, such as, Industry Initiatives for Supply Chain Synchronization: Continuous Replenishment (CR); Efficient Consumer Response (ECR); Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI); and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR); Supply Chain Risk Management, and Business Continuity Management (BCM); Sustainability Issues in Supply Chain Management including the Triple Bottom Line: Planet, People, Profit; the Impact of New Environmental Regulations; The 3Rs of Sustainable Supply Chain Management: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle; and Reducing the Transport-Intensity of Supply Chains.
Lean concepts for managers
The course describes the need for lean management; how wastes can be identified and eliminated; what tools are available for continuous improvement; and how and when these tools are used.
The Topics Covered in This Course Include: Principles of Lean Management (Why Lean in the Indian Context, Toyota Production System, Principles and Pillars of Lean); Wastes, and Concept of Value Addition, and Non-Value Addition; Value and Value Stream Mapping, Current State Diagram; Continuous Improvement Tools (Pareto, Fishbone, Control Charts, Scatter Diagrams, Checksheets, Affinity Diagrams); Workspace Organization; 5S Principles; Mistake Proofing (Poka Yoke); Concept of Push-Pull; Production Flow Analysis. Design of Cells Using ROC1 and ROC2; Kanban, Visual Signals, and JIT; Measuring and Analyzing Value Stream; Takt Time, Flow Rate; Future State Diagram; Lean Maintenance and Total Productive Maintenance.
24 MINOR COURSES
| Introduction to Operations Research | Marketing Management | Advanced Operations Research |
| Introduction to Finance and Accounting | Organisational Behaviour | Project Management |
| Consumer & Markets | Research Methods for Managers | Data Analytics Services |
| Introduction to People Management | Financial Management | E-Commerce * |
| Introduction to Entrepreneurship & Family Business | Operations Management | Production Planning & Control * |
| Introduction to Spreadsheet Modeling | Supply Chain Management | Advanced Supply Chain Management * |
| Introduction to Quantitative Methods | Supply Chain Design and Sourcing | Lean Concepts for Managers * |
| Managerial Economics | Logistics Management | Production Planning and Control * |
* 4th year undergraduate courses
Introduction to operations research
The course exposes students to fundamental optimization procedures and techniques to attain skills at structuring business problems and modelling them as a mathematical program, microsoft excel to solve such models, interpret solutions and use the solutions to answer the business problem. The focus of this course will be on applications of quantitative methods in modelling business situations.
Introduction to finance and accounting
The course is aimed at baptizing the students to the vocabularies of accounting theories and practices. Beginning with the accounting concepts, introducing the basic tenets in maintaining the books of accounts, the course finally culminates into the preparation of the financial statements like income statement, balance sheet as well as the cash flow statement. It also covers the bank reconciliation statement and bills of exchange.
Consumers and markets
This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the various dimensions of marketing as a discipline. It focuses on exploring various aspects of marketing, markets, consumers, their shopping behaviour and motivations. It gives broad understanding of the exciting world of shop, shopping and shopper.
Introduction to people management
This course introduces the basic context, concepts and importance of people management in organizations to students. It incorporates application of psychological and sociological concepts to provide understanding about how people work in organizations. The course familiarizes students with the fundamental ideas of organizational behavior and human resource management and prepares them for the advanced courses under the specialisation. It is designed as an essential first course for students of management and entrepreneurship, to familiarise them with the practices of managing people in organizations.
Introduction to entrepreneurship & family business
This course introduces students to entrepreneurship and family businesses. It provides an overview on how they come into being, their perspective on the ecosystem, their mindset and how they manage their enterprises.
Introduction to spreadsheet modelling
This course deals with the use of the spreadsheet to solve managerial problems. It merely highlights the use of microsoft excel as an aid in formulating business problems and invoking appropriate functions to resolve them.
Introduction to quantitative methods
This course is designed to give undergraduate students an introduction to decision making. The use of quantitative techniques is increasingly being adopted in all areas of human endeavour. The need to collect, analyze and interpret mathematical output is increasingly being appreciated for arriving at conclusions or in strategic decision making. This course will deal with fundamental concepts required to model, analyse and solve quantitative problems arising in any discipline. A student undertaking this course can have little to no formal introduction to mathematics and statistics at the higher secondary level.
Managerial economics
This course provides a foundation of economic theories and models for use in managerial decision-making. The course provides students with an overview of theories of demand, supply, production and competition and equips them with the tools and techniques to make effective economic decisions under different business environments.
Accounting for managers
Financial accounting provides the means of recording and reporting financial information in a business. Accounting plays a vital role as an information system for monitoring, problem solving and decision-making. This course provides the fundamentals of financial accounting and goes on to demonstrate how accounting fits into the overall business environment of an organization. In addition to this, management accounting systems, which have a strong internal focus can be effective tools in providing information that is useful in decision making at all levels in the organization. Management accountants play a strategic role in developing and providing both financial and non-financial information that is critical to the success of an organization.
Marketing management
This course provides a conceptual framework to the students to understand the function of marketing in an organization. The course helps students to apply the marketing concepts and theories to solve case studies and projects. The course makes them vigilant of the marketing happenings in the real world and therefore importance of creating effective marketing strategies.
Organisational behavior
This course is an introduction to organizational behaviour for undergraduates. It discusses behaviour in organizations at individual, group & organizational levels and provides an understanding of the underlying aspects that drive behavior. It provides insights into the different theories and their application in the organizational context. It also enables students to understand the utilisation of different tools and practices in directing individual actions towards organizational objectives.
Research methods in management
The objective of the course is to enable students to understand the role and importance of research in improving managerial decisions when faced with uncertainty. Research methods are applied in all functional areas of business viz. Operation management, accounting, finance and marketing. The issue facing managers is not a shortage of information but how to use the available information to make better decisions. Learning this course helps students recognise that data are inherently variable and that the identification measurement, control, and reduction of variation provide opportunities for quality improvement.
Financial management
This course in financial management provides a detailed understanding of the finance function and its interrelationship with other areas of business. It seeks to develop the foundation for financial management concepts. It primarily helps the student to understand how businesses make investment, financing, working capital management and dividend decisions and what are the key factors that influence these decisions.
Design thinking for managers
Design thinking (dt) is a powerful tool to tackle the unstructured & the unknown. Dt is a ‘human centered’ approach to problem solving which emerged at stanford in the 1960’s primarily as a systematic, immersive approach to product design. In recent years, it was found that these approaches can be extended to a wide category of ill-structured, real-world problems, both in emerging and developed markets alike. Dt is getting increasingly popular not only across top corporates, but also in rural, semi-urban and underserved sections of society. Given the diversity of challenges that we face today, it therefore becomes necessary to have thinkers and doers who can focus on addressing such challenges. Dt helps in building those capabilities.
Business ethics and corporate governance
The course aims to develop in the student a clear perspective on the role and responsibilities of business in society. It helps the student understand the role of ethics in business. It also dwells on corporate governance frameworks and their relevance to contemporary business environment.
Business innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy
The course is designed to expose the student to innovation and its application in entrepreneurship. Today it is the use of innovation in entrepreneurship that makes companies to sustain and pose a threat for competitors. This course will enable students to understand the dynamic nature of the environment and the need for being innovative. In this course, the emphasis is not on filling in frameworks. On the contrary, students will be taught to exhibit unconventional thinking and link it to entrepreneurship. The practical and interwoven theoretical nature of class deliberations will cull out the deeper understanding of entrepreneurship. This course enables a student to understand the role of innovation at different fronts such as product, process, business model etc.
Logistics management
The Logistics Management course will help the participants understand how logistics is managed in the modern global supply chains on the inbound and outbound sides; and what techniques are employed to make supply chains lean and efficient. Industrial packaging (unitizarion, palletization, and containerization), and all of the modes of transportation (rail, road, marine, and air) are covered in detail. Logistics documentation for national and international trade are also studied. Other topics covered in the course include warehousing, inventory management, and logistics service providers.
Supply chain management
The Supply Chain Management (SCM) course helps participants understand the key concepts, strategies, tools, and technologies related to Supply Chain Management. The overall structures of different types of supply chains and the techniques used to manage them are covered in adequate detail. The four supply chain cycles, namely the procurement cycle, manufacturing cycle, replenishment cycle and customer order cycle, are included to give a wholistic picture of the business operations.
Supply chain design and sourcing
The Supply Chain Design and Sourcing (SCDS) course focuses on the key concepts, tools, and technologies related to supply chain strategy formulation, strategic sourcing, and advanced supply management (purchasing). The course is designed to help participants understand the linkages between the competitive strategy of the firm and the supply chain strategy. The techniques used to mass customize products for the end consumer are covered in great detail. The purchasing process, strategic sourcing, and portfolio approach to sourcing are also included.
Enterprise systems
The Enterprise Systems (ES) course is designed to familiarize the participants with the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that are now universally used by business organizations to run their transactions and generate various reports. The course helps students understand the cross-functional nature of business processes and their relationship to organizational areas. The participants can familiarize themselves with the key business processes through hands-on experience on the latest version of one of the enterprise resources planning packages. Detailed case studies and exercises are included.
Project management
The Project Management course helps students understand how the large-scale projects are conceptualized, planned and executed in a systematic way. The course covers the generation and screening of project ideas, assessment of techno-economic feasibility of the projects, project appraisal techniques, project financing (including infrastructure finance), project planning and control using network techniques (PERT and CPM), cost control and quality control, crashing of activities for optimising project costs vis-a-vis project schedule, computerized project management (using Microsoft Project), and risk management for projects.
Production planning & control
The main objective of this course is to make the students familiar with how production planning is done in large manufacturing organizations using ERP and SCM software packages. The students will learn the basic framework of Production Planning & Control processes, Master Production Scheduling and Material Requirements Planning, MRP Outputs, Order Release and Order Management Processes. The topics covered include: Overview of Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP-II), Strategic and Business Planning and Resource Requirements Planning; Sales and Operations Planning; Demand Management; Material Requirements Planning Procedure; MRP-I Outputs and the Order Management Process.
Advanced supply chain management
This course covers advanced topics in SCM, such as, Industry Initiatives for Supply Chain Synchronization: Continuous Replenishment (CR); Efficient Consumer Response (ECR); Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI); and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR); Supply Chain Risk Management, and Business Continuity Management (BCM); Sustainability Issues in Supply Chain Management including the Triple Bottom Line: Planet, People, Profit; the Impact of New Environmental Regulations; The 3Rs of Sustainable Supply Chain Management: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle; and Reducing the Transport-Intensity of Supply Chains.
Lean concepts for managers
The course describes the need for lean management; how wastes can be identified and eliminated; what tools are available for continuous improvement; and how and when these tools are used.
The Topics Covered in This Course Include: Principles of Lean Management (Why Lean in the Indian Context, Toyota Production System, Principles and Pillars of Lean); Wastes, and Concept of Value Addition, and Non-Value Addition; Value and Value Stream Mapping, Current State Diagram; Continuous Improvement Tools (Pareto, Fishbone, Control Charts, Scatter Diagrams, Checksheets, Affinity Diagrams); Workspace Organization; 5S Principles; Mistake Proofing (Poka Yoke); Concept of Push-Pull; Production Flow Analysis. Design of Cells Using ROC1 and ROC2; Kanban, Visual Signals, and JIT; Measuring and Analyzing Value Stream; Takt Time, Flow Rate; Future State Diagram; Lean Maintenance and Total Productive Maintenance.