The recession had its impact across diverse sectors like finance, IT, manufacturing etc. What is common is one of the first signs of an economic recession – employee layoffs. What comes next is a series of steps for cost cutting, restructuring and a deep focus on sustainable change and innovation. That’s the reason why the speakers from diverse sectors of the economy were invited to share their views on the theme.

The event was opened with the traditional lamp-lighting ceremony. Thereafter, the panel members released the Ashwamedh journal for the year. Sujit Sanyal kicked off the event by presenting the various strategies which should be implemented in the times of recession through the perspective of sales and marketing. He also explicitly mentioned strategies like focusing on retaining existing customers and increased communication with these customers which Ricoh put in practice to reduce the effects of recession.

Then, it was the turn of Simanta Mohanty who turned the theme on its head and addressed it as “Is operational excellence enough to combat recession?” Being the GM-HR, IBM, Mohanty highlighted how the HR function becomes all more important in these recessionary times. He also reached out to the students of XIMB and appealed them to explore the unsighted domains, map operations in these domains and thus maintain the operational excellence template.

Describing outsourcing as a domain of IT industry which works on the operational excellence, Rajarshi Chatterjee reminded the audience of simple fundamentals and basics, and accentuated the fact that every aspect of operational excellence begins with discipline in everything we do and then doing it in a better way. He shared strategies to survive during these recessionary times which included customer relationships, vendor relationships, business processes, maintenance of internal systems and data management and the organisational culture. ‘Measure, report and act’ was the mantra which he gave to the students.

Representing the manufacturing sector, Satish Dhawan gave an insight into the combating strategies from the manufacturing perspective. He talked about the three-phased strategy of cost reduction, domestic growth and international growth and also discussed ongoing initiatives in TATA Motors like Kaizen, TPM and 5S where the focus is on interacting to improve continuously.

The final guest speaker for the evening was Sanjay Gupta, who hails from the agriculture sector. He gave seven mantras to the students which included issues like cost improvement, choosing the right business model, strategic investments and management of change, which forms the essence of operational excellence. He left the students with food for thought by alluding to the quality, cost and delivery mechanism that has extended nowadays to include speed, flexibility and risk as well.

On the sidelines, there was also a paper writing contest on the theme of the event which got over 100 entries from the top B schools of the country. The team from FMS bagged the first position whereas the team from IIM-Ahmedabad secured the second spot. The papers of the top eight teams of the contest have been published in this year’s Ashwamedh Journal.

Professor Subhajyoti Ray proposed the vote of thanks and highlighted the undercurrent of the various strategies, that how the eminent panelists from different sectors gave their opinions and it is the implementation of all these small but significant strategies which will make a bigger impact.