Supply Chains Are No Longer Back-End Cost Centres

Your career spans both consulting and academia, with a significant shift into teaching and research in operations and supply chain. Could you share what motivated this transition and how it has shaped your professional journey?
My transition from consulting to academia was motivated by a recurring tension I experienced in practice. In consulting, I was often involved in designing technically sound solutions. Yet I repeatedly saw that similar solutions produced very different outcomes across firms. The gap was rarely in analytical capability; it lay in incentives, organisational context, execution
discipline, and how decisions interacted over time. That raised deeper questions for me: why do some operational strategies
scale and sustain performance while others break down under uncertainty? Academia offered the space to step back and systematically examine these questions. Research allowed me to abstract real-world experiences into models and empirical analysis, while teaching gave me the opportunity to help students develop first-principles thinking about trade-offs, uncertainty, and system-wide effects. Over time, this shift reshaped my professional journey from solving isolated problems to understanding and designing decision systems. The combination of consulting intuition with academic rigour has been central to my work. I craft research questions grounded in reality and ensure that what I teach remains relevant to the complex operational challenges organisations face today.

Many professionals discover their interest early on, so was there any experience in your early career that sparked your interest in operations and supply chain as a field?
Growing up in a coalfield area strongly influenced my interest in operations and supply chain. My father worked in materials
management, and from a young age, I was exposed to conversations about procurement, inventory availability, logistics constraints, and the consequences of even small delays in material flow. In a capital-intensive, safety-critical environment like
mining, I could see how the availability of the right spare part or consumable at the right time directly affects production
continuity, worker safety, and costs. What stayed with me was the realisation that these were not abstract management issues. These were real coordination problems with tangible outcomes. Equipment downtime due to missing materials, overstocking of slow-moving spares, or challenges in transporting inputs across difficult terrain made it clear that materials management was central to operational performance. That early exposure helped me intuitively understand the importance of flow, uncertainty, and trade-offs long before I formally studied them. Later, when I encountered operations and supply chain as academic fields, it felt like a structured language for the problems I had observed first-hand, which naturally drew me towards the discipline.

Academia and industry evolve quickly, so how do you stay connected with what’s happening in the industry while teaching and doing research?
Staying connected with the industry requires being intentional about how research and teaching are designed. I do this in three
ways. First, many of my research questions originate from real managerial problems discussed during interactions with practitioners, industry collaborators, and policy-facing organisations. Working with applied datasets and industry-driven problem statements ensures that my research remains grounded in operational realities rather than purely theoretical abstractions. Second, the classroom itself is an important channel. Many students come with prior industry experience, and classroom discussions often surface emerging practices. I actively incorporate these insights into cases, assignments and simulations, which keep the curriculum current and bidirectional. Finally, I engage regularly through executive education, workshops and practitioner-oriented forums. These interactions help me validate whether the frameworks we teach and study still resonate with managers facing uncertainty, disruption and performance pressures. Together, these channels create a continuous feedback loop where industry informs research and teaching, and academic rigour, in turn, sharpens industry practice.

Supply chain strategy has changed rapidly in recent years, so what do you see as the biggest shifts, especially with digital transformation and analytics becoming mainstream?
In my view, supply chain strategy has undergone three clear shifts in recent years. First, supply chains have moved from being back-end cost centres to front-page strategic concerns. Recent disruptions exposed how deeply resilience, risk management and even national policy considerations are embedded in supply chain design. As a result, boards and top leadership now view supply chains not just as execution engines, but as sources of competitive advantage and strategic vulnerability. Second, digital tools and analytics have changed the time horizon of decision-making. We have moved from managing through the rear-view mirror — that is, through post hoc monthly or quarterly reports — to operating in near real time. Concepts such as predictive alerts and scenario rehearsals enable firms to anticipate disruptions and respond coherently, rather than scrambling reactively after each shock. Third, organisations are no longer solely driven by cost efficiency. Today, it is about balancing cost efficiency with robustness, sustainability and stakeholder expectations, whether related to decarbonisation, labour standards or data transparency. Digital transformation and analytics are powerful enablers, but they create value only when embedded into everyday decisions, incentives and governance structures. When treated as isolated pilots or impressive slide decks, they add little strategic impact.

Companies today are trying to balance sustainability with performance, so how can organisations pursue sustainability without compromising on cost and efficiency?
The tension between sustainability and performance is often a symptom of short-term accounting, not a real trade-off. When
sustainability is embedded into process design — reducing waste, redesigning logistics networks or enabling circular flows — it
frequently improves both cost efficiency and the overall risk profile. For instance, better demand planning reduces overproduction, lowering emissions and inventory holding costs rather than adding to them. The organisations that do this well do not treat sustainability as a parallel agenda; they redesign how value is created so that ‘green’ and ‘lean’ reinforce each other. Practically, that means three things: using circularity and waste reduction to cut material and energy costs; building efficiency into processes through better planning and network design; and hard-wiring sustainability metrics into business cases so that emissions, risk and reputation are evaluated alongside rupees and lead time. The real turning point comes when boards stop seeing sustainability as a moral extra and start seeing it as the core of risk management and opportunity. Once incentives and KPIs move in that direction, many ‘sustainable’ moves simply look like good operations decisions.

The global supply chain environment is becoming more dynamic and uncertain, so what skills do you think future supply chain leaders need to succeed?
Future leaders will need a blend of analytical depth, managerial judgement, stakeholder fluency and learning agility. Comfort with data, optimisation models and simulation is essential, but so is the ability to interpret model outputs critically. Leaders must also manage uncertainty, coordinate across organisational boundaries and make ethically defensible decisions under pressure. The leaders who will succeed are those who can stay calm under stress, run ‘what if’ scenarios before crises hit, and treat every
disruption as data for redesigning a stronger system, not just as a fire to be put out. Systems thinking — and understanding interdependencies, rather than optimising isolated components — will be a defining capability.

XLRI places a strong emphasis on ethical and value-based leadership, so how do you bring those values into teaching technical subjects like operations and supply chain?
In operations and supply chain, ethical questions arise naturally: whom to prioritise during shortages, how to balance efficiency
with equity, or how risk is distributed across suppliers. I incorporate these issues by embedding ethical trade-offs into technical
problems. For example, allocation models can be discussed not only in terms of cost minimisation but also fairness or access.
This helps students see that technical rigour and ethical reasoning are complementary, not competing, skills.

Many students aspire to build long-term careers in supply chain, so what advice would you give to someone entering the field today?
The following would be three cents from my side to the budding supply chain managers: Master not only the fundamentals, but go one step further by learning to reason from first principles. Instead of asking ‘which tool should I apply?’, ask what the core problem is, what constraints truly matter and what trade-offs are unavoidable. This kind of critical thinking allows you to cut through complexity and evaluate new technologies or analytics solutions without being driven by buzzwords. Deliberately seek ground exposure early in your career. Spend time in warehouses, plants, transport hubs and with suppliers or customers. Observing how work happens sharpens problem definition and prevents purely theoretical or spreadsheet-driven solutions. First-principle thinking becomes far more powerful when it is anchored in real operational constraints. Be solution-oriented but not tool-obsessed. Invest as much in people skills as in analytics, because supply chain problems are rarely solved by models alone. They require collaboration across functions, trade-offs, negotiation and clear communication under pressure. When you combine strong fundamentals, critical thinking from first principles and the ability to translate insights into implementable actions, you can navigate uncertainty and create lasting value.

Xplore functions as the CXO club of XLRI, so how do you think it can contribute to students’ careers, spark greater interest in supply chain and operations, or introduce new initiatives to strengthen learning in these areas?

Xplore already sits at a powerful intersection: it is student-led, has CXO access and runs formats like roundtables, speaker sessions, workshops and podcasts. Xplore can curate focused CXO conversations on high-impact topics such as inventory crises,
network redesigns, tech outages and decarbonising logistics, so students can see how core operations decisions play out in
boardrooms. They can work on sourcing live projects from industry partners where students work on real data. Xplore can use its media platforms to spotlight operations stories: short columns or podcast episodes in which alumni and leaders narrate a single decision, failure or redesign that changed how their organisation runs.