Friday, December 28, 2018

Food wastage across the world ..

In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply. This estimate, based on estimates from USDA's Economic Research Service of 31 percent food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010. - www.usda.gov

Per capita waste by consumers is between 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, south and south-eastern Asia, each throw away only 6-11 kg a year. - www.fao.org


Who are the chronic food wasters of the world ?

US and Europe are the chronic top food wasters of the world.

At the consumer end, people of Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia are most conservativem they are most responsible and waste the least in the world.

Can the world educate the governments and people of US and Europe to not waste food ? 

EPGDM - Links to some good write-ups on Lean Operations

These are links to some of the writings/readings I have done on Lean related topics over the past many years. You may find them interesting.  You can concentrate on the major tools in Lean Operations which can also be accessed from my lecture audios. (I shall keep adding interesting links soon ..)

Pl do go through the links given below to understand the concepts better ..

Thursday, December 27, 2018

ORSI conf IIT Bombay Dec 2018

Self, (ext L) Sundaravalli PhD-IIMA (centre), Mangesh PhD-IITB 
(2nd from L)
and Jayan PhD-IITB (ext right) with GURU Prof. Narayan Rangaraj 
PhD-Johns Hopkins (red shirt)
- Meeting after 18 years ,...
The student volunteers
Slowly I trekked to the main building in IITB from the Main gate, carrying with me loads of expectations. Memories of 20 years came gushing back.

On the morning of 16 Dec 2018 here I was coming straight from Mumbai airport to IITB classroom for the pre-conference tutorials. Fresh air and great expectations. True as the standards of IITB are and were, the pre-conf tutorials were excellent.  

It was great to be back at my alma mater during 16-19 December 2018 for an ORSI conf. Met my M Tech friends Sundaravally (now faculty in IIMA) and Mangesh with TCS .. Both have completed their PhD too.. Jayan Moorkanat, my 2 years PhD senior has transformed into an entrepreneur and I wish him all the best in his career. 

It was great meeting my thesis Supervisors Prof. Narayan Rangaraj (NR) and Prof. N. Hemachandra. 


 As feedback is an important aspect for growth and development, here is my brief feedback about the conference. 

Prof. Rangaraj leading the final panel discussion
1. The conf was very well managed in terms of high quality content delivery, 
2. Great heavy discussions and 
3. Very effective and proper time management. 
4. Kudos to the students cultural team for a memorable cultural evening too.

Good show by Prof. Jayendran and team for smoothly managing this conference. Wishing Jayendran more applause for future events too. Food quality and variety was great !! 

The student cultural events presentation was a class by itself. Reminded me of my IITB around '98  when we used to run around organising events and cultural evenings for the RSF.. 

With my Supervisors Prof. NR(l) and N Hemachandra (c)
There were interesting topics which I wanted to attend but happened in parallel with other sessions and hence had to miss it. 


Yes, guilty of doing OR !! (late realisaton !!)
Can we think of some strategy whereby participants could benefit from the parallel presentations, which he/she could not attend.? Some brainstorming could be done about it. 

Also one thing IITB really needs to be grateful to its alumni, is the well maintained and managed Victor Menezes Convention Centre (click here for more info on VMCC). 

Very comfortable and a perfect setting for high quality International Conferences.  

Victor Menezes, '70 Electrical engg BTech, after graduating from IITB went to MIT and retired as the Sr. VP for Citibank. He made a generous $3 million, (app INR 20 crores) which made the VMCC facility possible. Were it not for his magnanimity, VMCC would not have come up at all..   
Victor Menezes  (IITB '70) will be remembered forever ..
Thank you Sir !!

One thing that caught my attention as different from earlier times was the stress on reducing wastage. I was specifically asked beforehand through a google doc which all food sessions I will be taking, so that food waste could be minimised. Also our badges after the conference were collected so that we would not throw it around and cause an ecological problem. 

Overall the conference was well managed, had lot of high quality discussions and presentations, talks etc from experts from the field. 

Time well spent.. 

George..



Monday, December 24, 2018

Proposing a solution to the rift in Orthodox church ..

The rift between the Orthodox and Jacobite believers in the Kerala church has caused lot of pain to the practitioners of the faith. Only a consensus will work, that is what a section of the believers say. No force or litigation can solve such issues.

Click here for a pdf copy of my writing on this topic..

Can we bring peace and love back to the church ? Are we running behind material possessions or spiritual possessions ?

My earlier writing on the SC verdict .. Pl click here ..

George..

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

SCM Biennial Conference, IIM Bangalore

The 2 day Biennial Conference on Supply Chain Management at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India on 10,11 December 2018 is one of the very interesting and important conferences in South India in the field of SCM.

The theme of the Conference this year was Building Intelligent Supply Chains.  

The Conference had four keynote talks / expert sessions by industry experts and top academics in the SC field and 48 papers presented by the delegates from across the country and abroad in technical sessions spread over two days.

The expert sessions in the morning on both the days from 9.30 am to 11.30 AM were very beneficial. On the first day we had the IIM Dean Prof. Naik inaugurating the Conference  and speaking on his research and experience in the area of agri-supply chains in India and particularly in Karnataka. It was followed by an interesting talk on agri-supply chain, Rashtriya emarketing services by R Manoj, Jt Secretary to the Govt of Karnataka. Karnataka is one of the only states in the country where information helps in streamlining the agricultural operations, adding value throughout till the final sale of the produce, helping the farmers realise more returns in the long run.

The second session by Prof. Milind Sohoni from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad was interesting. He spoke on the impact of for-profit and not-for-profit philanthropy and how it could be modeled in terms of the visible and tractable outcomes to better manage funding questions of these NGOs. 

After a quick tea, the participants dispersed for six technical sessions happening on the first day, two sessions parallel on supply chains, sc metrics, ecommerce and logistics  .. I presented two papers in the logistics area, case study on Used Shipping Containers - a Maersk case study and another one on the Insolation of Kochi International Airport in sessions 3A and 3B post lunch on day 1.

The second day started with very interesting technical session on core Supply Chain Management issues by Ms. Ushasri TS of Manhattan Associates. She spoke quite eloquently as to what were the challenges the supply chain industry across the world was facing as regards visibility and variability of demand. She was talking of how it was very easy in these days of excess data floating around, to get drowned in digital lakes.

Prof. G Raghuram, Director IIM Bangalore gave a very detailed talk in his usual style with lot of facts and illustrations on improving supply chain logistics performance by incorporating the SWIFT model (Sustainability, Warehousing, ICT, Fragmentation and Transportation Infrastructure). Prof. Raghuram also discussed about the various startups in India that were active in the logistics and delivery area like RIVIGO, Delhivery, Blackbuck, Storeking, AtiMotors etc ..

The technical sessions for the second day were a bit longer from 11 to 2.30 PM and we had a late lunch after which all of us dispersed. The agri-supply chains papers which stressed more on the organic produce supply chain was very interesting, was very informative and interesting too. 

Some sad facts about Indian farmers are

1. unlike the western farmer who gets 66% of the cost of the final price charged to the customers, in the case of the Indian farmer it is just 33% ..

2. There is no support from any government to help farmers cultivate organic produce in the country by way of subsidies etc..

3. Even though it is unfair on the Father on India's Green Revolution Dr MS Swaminathan, the green revolution which he stressed so much in the 60s has now been overtaken by greed and dishonesty. Farmers and middle men are indulging in unfair practices out of greed to increase their final yield in the process, making the produce unhealthy and carcinogenic. At the same time they are unmindful of the damage to mother earth with excess dose of chemical fertilizers which is destroying the precarious ecological balance.

In was quite interesting to note in one of the papers presented how the farmers found supplying to organised retail like Tata Star Bazar, Reliance Retail, More etc was loss making to the farmer due to the exacting requirements on quality, delivery standards etc. I was having the opposite opinion all this time. It is the responsibility of the SC field in general to help farmers acquire this professionalism in such sc operations.

The sessions and discussions were of high quality. There were almost 50 papers presented at the conference and about 70+ delegates. The supporting services were very efficiently managed including lunch, snacks etc. I too got to chair one of the sessions on Logistics (2B).

Overall the conference was a great value-add. It has motivated me to be more active on this learning and presenting circuit across different Institutes in the country and abroad. I wish to thank the organisers and faculty of the Operations area of IIM Bangalore profusely for making this conference happen and making it a great success too.

George..

Saturday, December 08, 2018

A peep into our future .. (from the Internet)

☆  ☆  ☆  ☆  ☆ 
Some Very Interesting Predictions: This is how our is  going to be like .. Let's be prepared for it .. 

1-Auto repair shops will go away. 

2-A gasoline engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has 20. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are only repaired by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor.

3-Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with robots.

4-Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what looks like a Jiffy-auto wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee and out comes your car with a new electric motor!

5-Gas stations will go away.

6-Parking meters will be replaced by meters that dispense electricity.  Companies will install electrical recharging stations; in fact, they've already started.

7-Most (smart) major auto mfgs have already designated money to start building new plants that only build electric cars. 

8-Coal industries will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away.  Drilling for oil will stop. So say goodbye to OPEC!

9-Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day and then they use and will sell it back to the grid. The grid stores it and dispenses it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla roof?

10-A baby of today will only see personal cars in museums. FUTURE is approaching faster than most of us can handle.

11-In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt. Who would have thought of that ever happening?

12-What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen in a lot of industries in the next  5-10 years … and most people don't see it coming.

13-Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later, you would never take pictures on  film again? With today's smart phones, who even has a camera these days?

14-Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. First ones only had  10,000 pixels, but followed Moore's law.  So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a time, before it became way superior and became mainstream in only a few short years.

15-It will now happen again (but much faster) with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.

16-Forget the book, "Future Shock", welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution.

17-Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.

18-UBER is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and are now  the biggest taxi company in the world! Ask any taxi driver if they saw that coming.

19-Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don't own any properties.   Ask Hilton Hotels if they saw that coming. 

20-Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world.
This year, a computer beat the best Go-player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected.

21-In the USA, young lawyers already don't get jobs. Because of  IBM's Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for right now, the basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So, if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% fewer lawyers in the future, (what a thought!) only omniscient specialists will remain.

22-Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, its 4 times more accurate than human nurses.

23-Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.

24-Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars are already here. In the next 2 years, the entire industry will start to be disrupted. You won't want to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination.

25-You will not need to park it you will only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving. The very young children of today will never get a driver's license and will never own a car.

26-This will change our cities, because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We can transform former parking spaces into parks.

27-About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide including distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every 60k miles; with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in 6 million miles. That will save a million lives plus worldwide each year. 

28-Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt. Traditional car companies will try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.

29-Look at what Volvo is doing right now; no more internal combustions engines in their vehicles starting this year with the 2019 models, using all electric or hybrid only, with the intent of phasing out hybrid models.

30-Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi; are completely terrified of Tesla and so they should be. Look at all the companies offering all electric vehicles. That was unheard of, only a few years ago.

31-Insurance companies will have massive trouble because, without accidents, the costs will become cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.

32-Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute, people will move farther away to live in a more beautiful or affordable neighborhood.

33-Electric cars will become mainstream about 2030. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity.

34-Cities will have much cleaner air as well. (Can we start in Los Angeles, please?)

35-Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean.

36-Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 yrs, but you can now see the burgeoning impact.  And it's just getting ramped up.

37-Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that simply cannot continue - technology will take care of that strategy.

38-Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There are companies who will build a medical device (called the "Tricorder" from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample and you breath into it.  It then analyses 54 bio-markers that will identify nearly any Disease. There are dozens of phone apps out there right now for health purposes.

WELCOME TO TOMORROW – it actually arrived a few years ago.  (From the Internet)

Thursday, December 06, 2018

Parukutty Nethyaramma - Most able administrator of Kerala ..

Parukutty Nethyaramma
Somehow, I had never heard of this courageous lady ruler of Kochi / Thrissur,  Parukutty Nethyarammma, even though I was in Palghat / Thrissur / Kochi area for all of my schooling and initial college  .. 

Great woman !!  Click here for an article on Parukutty Nethyaramma ..

We, the present people of Kerala owe a lot to these great leaders for their ability and smartness around 150 years back ..

The British govt in their rule in India recognised the effots of many individuals (very few Indians, 13 to be precise) and awarded them the honour and medal of Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal. Parukutty Nethyaramma .. 32 Indians have received Kaiser-i-Hind of unknown grade, including the Father of our Nation, Mahatma Gandhi.

Click here for a Malayalam version of a video speech on Parukutty Nethyaaramma by Dr Alexander Jacob, IPS.

My sister also completed her education from the land of such noble women ! Quality speaks !! 

George .. 

Monday, December 03, 2018

Sentinelese and the history of humanity


Madhumala with Jarawa tribe in Andaman 
Are the Sentinelese, who are presently being branded as very violent, reminding us of our ancestors 60,000 years back who migrated out of Africa, the cradle of human civilisation ?? We know of our ancestors not more than 10,000 years back. 

The Sentinelese tribals, their traditions, lifestyle, beliefs and culture must be preserved by all means as they are our sole opportunity along with Jarawa tribe to understand how our ancestors lived and migrated to different parts of the world out of Africa. 
Death of US missionary John Chau has again kindled global interest in knowing our common anthropological history.  

On Jan 4 1991 when a researcher from Archeological Society of India , Madhumala Chattopadhyay was the first woman to establish contact with the Sentinelese in North Sentinelese islands in Andamans located 1200 km from Indian mainland, nobody knew she was making history !!

The outside world would like to know the following facts and much more..
1. what is inside the 60 sqkm island covered with thick vegetation ?
2. Where do the elderly of the sentinelese live ?  
3. How many of them are in total in the island 60 sqkm in area and 111 m above MSL ? 
4. What is their lifestyle ? 
5. Where do they bury their dead ? 
6. What are their customs, beliefs and rituals ?
7. Do they have any records of past events with them ?  
8. How many times have outside race people come there ? 
9. What is the average life span of these people, the diseases if any they suffer from etc
10. Where and how do they stay ? 
Yual Noah Harari
11. Do they have social systems like marriage etc ?
There are thousands and thousands of such questions we would like to know about their style of living ..  Anthropologists the world over would now be interested in knowing more about these tribals to learn more about how humans have evolved over the years ? Will these revelations point to the end of organised religion in the world ?

Will the Jewish Professor Yual Hariri have to rewrite the history of mankind ?

george..

George .

Saturday, December 01, 2018

Lean Six sigma tools ..

Lean: Kaizen, Value Stream Process Mapping, 5s, Kanban, Error Proofing, Productive Maintenance, Set Up Time Reduction, Reduce Lot Sizes, Line Balancing, Schedule Leveling, Standardized work, and Visual Management.

Six Sigma: Recognize, Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control, Standardize, and Integrate.

Lean six sigma organizes lean and six sigma to cut production costs, improve quality, speed up, stay competitive, and save money. From six sigma they gain the reduced variation on parts. Also, lean focuses on saving money for the company by focusing on the types of waste and how to reduce the waste. The two coming into lean six sigma to better each other creating a well balanced and organized solution to save money and produce better parts consistently.

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