My Godrej LOUD Pitch & Key Learnings

We all have hobbies that we have nurtured since childhood or some newly formed ones. But hardly do we get any platforms to showcase our hobbies and where they are acknowledged and appreciated. Godrej organizes a competition for the top B-school students every year named LOUD – Live Out Ur Dream. Students are asked to pitch their application in a form of a story in any format: Video, Audio, PowerPoint Presentation etc. This year I was amongst the students who had participated in this event. I’ll walk you through my journey of video making for this competition.

Before we move ahead, have a look at my LOUD application video on this YouTube link – 

https://youtu.be/Mns4OpyfGwg

Step 1: Believe in your Dream

The process of application started by understanding the requirements of the competition. We need to know the requirements before making any application. Here too, I first understood what I was expected to do and only then started the next steps. A lot of students may feel that their dream is not a “winning” dream and that they have no chance of even competing in this contest. But this is what the first step is, Godrej is looking for people with a passion for their dream. Students might not have won a lot of awards for their respective dreams but if they have enough passion for it, they will surely have something to showcase about their dreams. The dream can be a very common dream related to drawing, painting, singing, dancing, etc but the passion for that dream is what they are looking for. Hence the first step is to believe in your dream.

Step 2: Watch past applications

Now that you have started believing in your dream, the next step is to understand how to convey your dream to the audience. There are various ways of communicating your dream to the audience which includes Video, Audio, PowerPoint Presentation etc. To understand what suits best for you, go through the applications of the students of the previous year who had applied for the competition. These videos are available on the Godrej website here –

https://www.godrejcareers.com/loud/sample-applications

Step 3: Gather your data

After watching the past years’ applications, now is the time for you to gather all the data related to your dream. This may contain photographs, certificates, videos, testimonials, etc. Initially, do not judge on the data that you might find in your old albums. Just understand that now you are just collecting the data. Let’s keep the organizing part for the next step.

Step 4: Make a story from your data

Once you have all the data related to the dream application, start thinking of how you can showcase this data in a proper story. This story is what the audience will be interested in and hence this is the most important step of your application. Dump all the data in a PowerPoint and start working on it to form a story.

Step 5: Final Editing

Once you have the outline of your story ready, move on to make the final editing of your application. If you make a video application, it may exceed 5 Mb for which you can upload it on your YouTube channel or drive and then share the link. If it is in a form of PowerPoint, then it may not exceed the limit and in that case, you may upload the file directly.

Step 6: Watch your Deadlines!

While your application might be on the verge of being the best, it is very important to finish it within the timeline. I would advise from my experience to finish the application one day before the deadline to avoid any last moment changes affecting your application.

All the best for your application.

How supply chains can prepare for a second wave of COVID-19

From both a humanitarian and business standpoint, the impact that this novel virus has had and continues to have cannot be underestimated. For businesses, it has led to significant drops in revenue and productivity. The combination of the two is now leading to thousands of job losses and an impending global recession. It has also changed the way they approach their supply chains, transitioning away from the notion of static networks towards more dynamic value chains.

Partly due to a relaxation of lockdown protocols and partly as a result of businesses beginning to reassess their supply chains, there have certainly been recent signs of recovery. The UK’s retail sales figures for June reaching ‘near pre-lockdown levels’ is a clear sign of this. However, in conglomeration with this signal of hope there remains a residue of uncertainty and concern, which is quickly rising to the surface. This comes in the form of a second or even third wave of infections across the globe. Businesses need to take the lessons they have learned from the last six months and prepare for this eventuality.

 

Unprecedented? Not anymore

When COVID-19 first emerged as a global pandemic the word ‘unprecedented’ was, and in many cases, still is used with a frequency which has somewhat negated the meaning of the word. It is, of course, certainly true that nobody saw this pandemic coming and that there have been precious few viruses in human history to compare it to. The World Health Organisation has even labelled it the ‘most severe’ global health emergency ever.

However, there has to be a point at which businesses stop using the word ‘unprecedented’ and use the new precedents set by the pandemic to become both more resilient and more agile. Across the globe, we have now lived with this virus for long enough to know what measures can be used to tackle it, the speed with which they can be implemented and the disruptions that they cause.

Whether it concerns the impact of stockpiling, which led to shortages of essential items such as toilet paper, or the issue of excess stock as demand for products fluctuated, there now exists six months’ worth of data about the impact of COVID-19 on businesses. Therefore, should there be a second or a third wave of the virus, which leaders across Europe are bracing themselves for, businesses now have both the information and the opportunity to leverage technologies such as AI and machine learning to prepare and react accordingly.

 

Lessons learned

The phrase ‘hindsight is a wonderful thing’ is often framed sarcastically or regrettably. However, in this instance, there is a great deal which businesses can gain from hindsight; from looking back at the last six months and assessing what went wrong, why and how they can avoid history repeating itself.

For businesses, one of the major pain points during the pandemic stemmed from lockdown protocols, which saw shops, offices and even entire countries locked down. This caused havoc within the supply chain. Firstly, it meant that key nodes within the supply chain, whether for transportation, sourcing or storage, were either eliminated as an option or reduced to very limited capacity. Secondly, a shift in consumer priorities saw huge fluctuations in demand, leading to both excesses and shortages in supply.

These disruptions, and the suddenness of them, highlighted one very important lesson for businesses: failure to prepare is preparing to fail. For many businesses, the issue was simple: they did not have the technology in place to adapt to these disruptions. As a result, if they were able to recover at all, it was either too late or not a long-term solution. In many cases, it might have been both. This needs to change moving forwards.

 

Bending not breaking

When considering how businesses can make their supply chain both flexible and resilient, a good analogy to draw is how buildings are made to withstand earthquakes. In Japan, a country more at risk with earthquakes than most, buildings are fitted with base isolators. These act as shock absorbers between the building and the ground. Essentially, when an earthquake hits, the building can slide back and forth while remaining upright: flexible, yet resilient.

Similarly, the supply chain has to be flexible in order to withstand shocks and continue performing its primary function. However, instead of using base isolators, flexible supply chains should rely on technology such as digital twins, AI and machine learning to navigate through disruptions.

Using COVID-19 as an example of a disruption, businesses which have a living, breathing digital twin of their supply chain can rapidly model all kinds of scenarios and evaluate the cost and service trade-offs associated with changes in the supply chain – whether planned or unplanned. Advanced algorithms can then be used to simulate and optimise the outcomes, providing insights which businesses can both rely and act upon.

With these systems in place, businesses can not only prepare for the expected, but for the unexpected too. Using digital twin technology, in combination with advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence, businesses can virtually test out contingency plans within the supply chain before putting them into practice. That means, should there be a second or third wave of COVID-19 infections and the subsequent disruptions, the supply chain can be quickly adapted to tackle these.

Businesses that want to be truly agile and resilient within their supply chain need to accept today’s reality: there is no ‘new normal’, just the ‘never normal’. Disruptions will always exist, whether we know they are coming or not, so businesses need to expect the unexpected and have the technology in place to deal with them. When it comes to implementation of this technology, the old adage rings true here: there’s no time like the present.

 

Future-proofing the supply chain post-COVID-19

 As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies in all industries are seeking ways to create more resilience in their supply chains.

It is hoped that the impact of COVID-19 will reduce to a manageable level that will allow normality to return to both personal and professional lives. When this happens, the greatest long-term risk to supply chains won’t be a virus. It will be trade protectionism, which was prominent before the COVID crisis and now threatens to choke off the lifeblood as we need to speed towards recovery.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, protectionism has scaled considerably. Some emergency moves are clearly temporary and were only put in place by governments to ensure access to the medicines, machines and protective equipment required to contain or treat the virus. In other cases, the aim was to guarantee adequate food supplies for local populations.

However, these new measures have been taken against a backdrop of simmering trade tensions between the United States and China and as a result of a growing chorus of voices in the US, Germany and other countries calling to reshore, nationalise or find other sources for key products and industries.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been weakened by a loss of faith in its dispute resolution system and the withdrawal of US support.

“In the current alternate universe we’re living in, global trade is collapsing and the WTO and the liberal order itself are in a true existential crisis,” Bloomberg noted in June.

As global economies emerge as a result of the pandemic, demand is expected to strengthen. As it does, trade flows, carrier schedules and inventory levels will begin to normalise and supply and demand is set to find a new standard.

However, normalisation won’t mean a return to normal. The World Bank anticipates a 5.2% contraction in global GDP in 2020. Advanced economies could shrink by as much as 7%, although they are likely to recover quicker than economies in emerging or developing countries.

Trade, which accounts for 54% to 60% of global economic activity in recent years is expected to retreat even further. The WTO expects a drop in global trade flows of 13% to 32% in 2020. 

The new age of protectionism will significantly scale the cost of goods at a time when we are experiencing historic levels of joblessness, poverty and business failures on every continent. Protectionism is expected to make supply chain resiliency harder to attain, not to mention more expensive. The first step towards resilience is diversification of sources and suppliers. For many, it means a reduction in reliance on China, which consists of 28% of global manufacturing. 

But reducing the reliance on China is not as simple as it seems. 40 years after it started modernising, China holds advantages that nowhere else has. It has unmatched scale, abundant skilled and unksilled labour, state-of-the-art automation, engineering and sciences, world-class infrastructure and logistics, closely synchronised and integrated supplier networks in country and across Asia. Leaving China would mean giving up on the world's largest consumer market and an economy increasing twice the rate of the US prior to COVID-19.