A guest lecture on “Operations in Retail Sector” was held on 15th Jan 2020. The guest lecture was organized by the Operations & SCM department to provide the students of Operations & RMM with an opportunity to know the retail sector. The guest lecture began with a welcome speech by operation students.
Mr Rajagopalan is an alumnus of IMT, Ghaziabad and now he is doing a PhD in Digital Assessment with 35 years of experience in Retail, Telecom, Manufacturing & Information industry. He is currently the Senior Vice President of Reliance Industries Limited (Refinery & Marketing). Operations in the retail sector include store design, customer service, display placement, money, credit handling, staff management and inventory optimization with the entire supply chain that leads to having products in the store. He has shown a Houdini challenge video from which we came to know that the only locked door is in our mind, the solution is just walk through it.
The first task to do in operation is a trading area survey. There are nearly 55,000 petrol pump stations. Location is the most important factor in retail. 26% of petrol/fuel consumed is non-transportable retail sector, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is commonly used. A low cost and potentially cover the method of remotely retrieving stored information is a technology with a potential for substantial social, economic, and legal impacts including a wide range of individual and social cost costs and benefits.
A recent growth of RFID applications in the retail sector has raised several specific privacy and data protection. There is a particular retail outlet setup like facilitator-project initializing license. Operation people helps to find perfect human resource needs & operational excellence. The way of working is as follows first you have to select best plan, second management of channel partners (operational excellence, sales enhancing, financial summary, the margin that can be given more in next time help them to sell more). Focus on the main agenda only, lead & lag focus measurement, a visible measurement like dashboard are the differentiating competencies which are necessary to grow in the retail sector.
Some Emotional Intelligence Models are used in retail operations are self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, empathy, social skills. These models are used to run operations. Three steps to build Emotional Intelligence are mindfulness, resilience and compassion. This session helped us to look forward for operations in the retail sector.