 Hello everyone, welcome to this course on supply chain digitization. Let us try to understand the need of this course and how this course is going to benefit all the participants. If we look into today's supply chain, it is increasingly becoming digital with the easy availability of data related to operations and purchases, payments are getting digitalized and the advent of the platform economy. While data visibility helps to streamline the operations, the supply chains are facing complexities due to the variabilities that span industries, markets and geographies. This course particularly aims to equip the participants with an introduction to the potential of digitalization in supply chains and provide more insights into the applications of analytics in supply chain management. With the help of this course, the participants are going to get benefited immensely because industries such as FMCG, e-commerce, automobile, transportation and logistics, pharmaceuticals, public distribution companies as well as consulting firms would definitely recognize and value this course. This course will be jointly taught by three faculty members from Indian Institute of Management Mumbai including myself, Professor Priyanka Verma and my other colleagues Prasad Sushmita Narayana and Professor Devabrata Das. If this course is divided in four modules, the first module talks about the introduction to the supply chain management. The second module discuss about the role of digital business in supply chains. The third module focuses on analytics in supply chain management and the fourth module talks about the requirement of digital infrastructure in supply chains and how it can be achieved. The first module is going to focus entirely on developing the fundamentals of supply chain management. This particular module is divided into three weeks and every week we will be covering two and a half hours of session. In the first week, we will be talking about the fundamentals of supply chain management. The purpose of module one is to ensure that all the participants who are coming from different backgrounds will get the basic understanding on supply chain management and all the terms and the terminology which we will be using throughout this course they get accustomed to and thereby it becomes easy for them to understand this course better. So, the first week we will be talking about the fundamentals of supply chain management. It is very important to understand that not all supply chains are same. We will look into this aspect and how one supply chain is different with respect to the other. We will look into this in further detail followed by this we will try to understand what is the role of different drivers in supply chains. What are the strategies which drives the supply chain and also it is very important to look into the difference between a responsive supply chain and a efficient supply chain. In the second week, the focus will be entirely on looking into supply chain segmentation which is actually driven by understanding on the challenges in a supply chain and how the supply chain segmentation can help us in managing these challenges. Further, we will look into what are the different ways of doing segmentation in supply chain. It can be based on product segmentation, demand segmentation, customer wise segmentation, geographical location segmentation or channel wise segmentation. They can be many more method other than this. So, we will look into this in further details. In the third week, we will be talking about the supply chain design and different operation strategy particularly about different types of supply portfolios and so on. Hello and welcome to the course on supply chain digitization as my colleague Professor Priyanka Verma was sharing. This is a very interesting and unique course that is positioned for industry professionals or anyone who is interested in the digitization elements in supply chain management. Since digitization is the focus of the course and as Professor Priyanka was sharing, we begin the course with an introduction to the basic ideas and fundamental concepts in supply chain management in module 1. Coming to module 2, this is where we start looking at what exactly is the role of digital business models in supply chain management. It is an interesting aspect where we would be dividing our discussions into two weeks. In the first week, we would be considering the foundational concept of platform economy which is present in all kinds of business models today, be it in taxi aggregation business, be it in e-commerce, be it in railway ticketing platforms, be it in any kind of business transaction, we observe the platform economy. However, what is not very well understood is how does this connect with supply chain management. So, we will look at what would be the relationship between platform economy and supply chains. Specifically, we will start looking at the channel structures in supply chain management as a preliminary understanding that is we would try to figure out what is meant by different kinds of channel structures such as decentralized structures or centralized structures. Now, this is a very fundamental concept which will then feed into week 5 and in week 5, we will further extend this idea of channel structures and the types of decision making that happens in supply chain management to concepts such as dual channels, brick and mortar channels, multi channels and omni channels. All of these topics are very relevant in today's context as we observe that supply chains are being used in order to reach the customer from different types of channels and the understanding of these channel structures is hence very, very important once we start functioning in a digital business environment. This would be the overview of module 2 and after this we will move to module 3. Dear participants, welcome to the course supply chain digitization. It is divided into 4 modules. Professor Priyanka Burma discussed about module 1. Professor Sushmita Narayana talked about module 2. I will now give an overview of module 3 which is about supply chain analytics. This particular module is spread across 4 weeks. In week 1, we will talk about data analytics and its importance. We will discuss big data and its characteristics specifically from the supply chain management point of view. We will also talk about various types of data analytics techniques such as descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. Then in next week, we will move into the applications of AI and ML techniques in forecasting as well as demand analytics. We will discuss why do I need to use AI and ML models for demand forecasting. What are the various AI and ML models are typically used for demand forecasting? In today's scenario, we will discuss few of these important machine learning models and demonstrate its applications using case studies from supply chain management domain. We will also do hands-on coding in Python. In next week, that is week 3 of this module, we will focus on supply chain network optimization. This is part of prescriptive analytics. In this week, we will use optimization technique to decide where to locate various facilities such as plants, warehouse and disease and which warehouse to be allocated to which plant, which disease to be allocated to which warehouse and how the movements of products would happen from various facilities to various different facilities so that overall cost of the network is minimized, supply chain becomes more efficient and service level is improved. In the last week of this module, we will focus on various intelligent decision support tools developed by using AI and ML algorithm. We will demonstrate these algorithms using case studies from supply chain management domain and hands-on coding using Python. So, now welcome to module 4. We have been discussing about various aspects of supply chain management as a part of this course which is on supply chain digitization. We started off with fundamentals of what is supply chain management, segmentation strategies, operation strategies. In module 2, we then looked at what is the role of digital business. In module 3, we started understanding the role of analytics to a large extent in supply chain management and how it plays an important role in making efficient and effective decisions that drive value. Coming to module 4, this is where we try to create and combine understanding across all the modules and now try to fit in the concept of digital infrastructure that is used in supply chain management. In this particular module, we will be focusing on our lectures to spread across three weeks and that would effectively be about 7 and a half hours of lectures. In the first week, we start looking at some of the very popular kinds of technologies that are being used in supply chain management, particularly since supply chain is about product movement. We will look at the role of product tracking and traceability systems which have become very important in order to create a proper trail of both material, financial and information sources and resources within the supply chain. Moving along, we then consider or address the role of information systems as an important digital infrastructure for supply chain management. Information systems are not only meant for a specific organization, but they can be used to integrate businesses across organization and some of the popular information systems that we shall be addressing and discussing would be the ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, WMS, Warehouse Management Systems, TMS such as the Transport Management Systems and various other such information systems that are very widely used across a variety of industries that are functioning within a supply chain. In the second week of this module, we will also look at some of the more advanced aspects of digital infrastructures for supply chains such as digital twins and control towers which have become very important in today's time considering the fact that supply chains are geographically dispersed across the continents across the globe and hence it is very difficult for one to have complete end to end visibility of supply chains. This is where digital twins and control towers come into place in order to provide a complete overview of the operations that happen within supply chains, a complete understanding of what could be possible scenarios and possible techniques in order to be applied within supply chains and also provide for monitoring and control mechanisms in a virtual environment. Finally, we will look at the role of industry 4.4 and block chains and digital payments within supply chains which has become important considering lots of advances that have happened in the internet of things era, lot of advancements that have happened in terms of the types of technologies used in financial transactions and information processing as well as how they have been seamlessly integrated into transactions that are going to span from the end customer all the way up to suppliers, manufacturers and vendors within the supply chain. So, with this complete understanding of supply chain digitization, any participant would be capable of preparing themselves for a role or career within supply chain management and will also be able to apply a lot of the concepts and strategies that are discussed in this course in the practical environment. In the final section of this course overview, I would like to present to you the connection between the course and the interministerial initiative of the country which is the PM Gatishakti National Master Plan which was announced in the year 2021. Now, this national master plan is an initiative that aims to facilitate development of multimodal logistics and connectivity infrastructure related to this for various economic zones across the country integrating nearly 16 ministries in this effort. Now, this particular initiative tries to break down departmental silos which will lay the foundation for holistic infrastructure development that can address multimodal and last mile connectivity issues pertaining to supply chain logistics and demand management in the country. So, in conclusion, this particular course which we are offering as a part of the NPTEL courses which is on supply chain digitization that is being offered by IIM Mumbai has been curated with this very perspective in order to provide a road map for practitioners in various industries, academicians across various domains pertaining to operations, supply chain management, logistics management as well as students who are interested in this field and who would like to develop a career in this field to understand the different aspects of technology, trends, digitization, analytics and optimization efforts that can be an integral part of the supply chain management and reinvention of the same. Finally, we aim to provide participants with a profound understanding of leveraging technology to improve operational efficiencies and decision making across the supply chain to accelerate the idea of the PM Gatishakti National Master Plan such that this leads to accelerated national development and infrastructure development across the country. Thank you and hope to see you soon in this course.