IIT Kharagpur students win Asian finals of APICS competition

NEW DELHI, MARCH 18: A two-member student team from IIT Kharagpur has been adjudged as the winner of the APICS Supply Chain Case Competition for South and Western Asia.

The American Production and Inventory Control Society is known as APICS is the world’s leading professional body for end-to-end supply chain excellence. The Case Competition has two segments in Asia, the Singapore edition for East Asian and South East Asian countries and the Hyderabad edition for West Asian and South Asian countries.

The winning team comprising Rohan Sewani and Rohit Sar from IIT Kharagpur was given a case for a toy manufacturing company which has recently shifted to manufacturing electronic toys and had its market spread out globally.

The case defined the specifics of the production amounts and capacities of each process of the manufacturing unit and also the layout of the factory, inventory distribution, inventory cycles, warehouse costs, operational expenditures, transportation etc. It was mentioned that the client was not performing very well in terms of demand fulfilment for the last two years and was not willing to invest any extra amounts for covering up the same.

Explaining why the solution proposed by the student team from IIT KGP was chosen the winner, Rohan Sewani, team member from the Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering, IIT Kharagpur said, “We had given both, analytical and qualitative solutions based on layout restructuring, work in Progress inventory cycle revision and elimination of external warehouses, decreasing the manpower and increasing Overall Equipment Effectiveness and yield. We showed major savings and recommended the use of the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence based Predictive & Preventive Maintenance based solutions to increase the Overall Equipment Effectiveness.”

The proposed solution from the IIT KGP team involved Material Flow Optimization, Inventory Optimization, Overall Equipment Effectiveness, and Material Yield. Finally, the case had to be presented as a business case to the board of directors’ and the complete solution was to be presented as a complete package of analytical solutions and savings, future recommendations and client psychology-based marketing.

The Regional Finals for West and South Asia had overall eight teams from India with management students from IIMs, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, NMIMS and Delhi University. The team from IIT Kharagpur was the only Indian team represented by undergraduate engineering students.

“The case was on a manufacturing facility layout restructuring problem. For undergraduate engineering students to achieve this feat in the Asian Regional Finals of APICS is significant in domains of operations management,” remarked Prof. Manoj Kumar Tiwari, Faculty, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Dean, Planning and Coordination, IIT Kharagpur.