Concentric 4.0 – Theme – INDUSTRY 5.

Concentric 4.0 is one of the most valued events organized by IIPC. The event was spread over a
period of two days, which included a case study competition and four guest sessions. It served as a
platform for the students of NMIMS to interact with various industry experts and share (know would
be a better word. Students can’t share their perspective) their perspectives on the future of
Consulting. This helped students who are looking forward to making a career in consulting prepare
themselves better for a sustainable future. Also, students across B-schools got an opportunity to
work on live business problems and prove their mettle through the pan-India case study
competition.

DAY 1
Day 1 unfolded with the opening address by Mr. Abhay Kantak, Director, Crisil. Mr. Kantak discussed
about natural monopoly. He asserted that a natural monopoly occurs when it makes the most sense,
for only one firm with the highest efficiency to exist in a given sector. He discussed how this would
be affected in the age of Industry 5.0, where a technology upsurge would eventually lead to gaining
faster economies of scale but at the same time, deploying the same technology would add to the
entry costs making the entry barriers in these industries stronger. He further deliberated on this
subject by citing the example of Medallion taxi service, New York which experienced a hit because of
the advent of tech driven ridesharing services like Uber and Ola, that are responsible for making
journeys just a click away from the users. He also discussed various other business models evolving
in this era of automation.

Later in the day, Mr. Satya Negi, National Manager Supply Chain HR, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages
took the stage and talked about workforce planning in the era of Automation. He impressed upon
the fact that it was imperative for the organizations to first understand the blueprint of their
workforce and then design a layout to prepare them for future. He further opined that a detailed
analysis of the kind of industry an organization operated in was equally important as it would be
helpful to the organization in understanding the extent to which the workforce was replaceable,
predictable and imitable with this ever evolving technology. He concluded by presenting his views on
how the prevalent technological disruption stood to impact the world of consulting. The digital
transformation, he said, was going to transform the role of a traditional consultant and that the line
between traditional consultancy and technology consultancy had blurred even more than ever
before.

Our next honorable speaker Mr. Deepak Panda, Director, Duff and Phelps took forward the
engagement by building on the same point of technological disruption in the banking and finance
sector. He started by discussing how design function played a major role in determining the best
physical form of a product or service to meet customer needs. He stated that design function played
an important role right from the inception of the idea to the product expiry. He then shifted his
focus towards Gig economy, a market of human capital characterized by on-demand jobs and
freelancers which is totally different from the traditional culture of permanent jobs. He built on this
topic by talking about how computerization had given rise to gig economy by creating flexi work
hours and opportunities to gain income. Being an alumnus of NMIMS Mumbai, he could better
connect with the students and that was evident with the openness with which his speech got
converted into more of a conversation and students made the talk more enriching by putting
forward more and more questions on varying topics. The discussion varied from economy to politics
and even to abstract topics.
The day concluded with the enriching thoughts shared by Mr. Yash Gupta, Director, PwC. The session
helped the students understand consulting as an industry and also helped them gauge what skill sets
were required for a career in consulting. Mr. Gupta explained consulting as a future career option
which provided one a chance to bring out the creative side of oneself, given the nature of the work.
He also said that the most valued advantage of a career in consulting was to be mentored by the
senior most talent in the industry. He said that he followed a rule of thumb to collect the know-how
of the industry on a daily basis and be aware of the current happenings in the industry. He
emphasized on the importance of always having an a questioning attitude so as to dig into the
reasons of those happenings. Mr. Gupta’s session marked the closure of the first day of the event as
students went back feeling enriched, with first-hand knowledge about the consulting industry.

DAY 2
Day 2 witnessed the final round of the consulting case study competition powered by Dimension
Data. The Case provided the students an opportunity to test their business acumen and to choose
the right business strategy to solve a real business case.

Students participated in a team of 3 and they were supposed to come out with a solution for the
organizations to innovatively address an urgent need for up-skilling and cross-skilling of its people to
keep pace with the fast changing technological advancements, while not losing sight of its
immediate business goals. The stakes were worth fighting for. The Winning team got a cash prize of
Rs. 40,000 and the runner-up team got a cash prize of Rs. 20,000. The competition received 348
registrations from premiet B-schools across India like IIM-A, B, L, IIFT, JBIMS etc. After a closely
fought contest, Team from XLRI Jamshedpur bagged the first prize by proposing the following
solution.

KEY INSIGHTS BY THE WINNING TEAM

The team suggested two solutions to tackle the problem of talent shortage. First suggestion was to
invest in learning and development to grow the organization’s talent pipeline and then to help
people move up to new roles inside or outside the organization.

The team suggested following the VRIO framework to execute the suggestion. VRIO is a strategic
analysis FRAMEWORK that is used for the internal analysis of strategic planning. The framework
helps in the evaluation of resources and capabilities of an organization. In this framework, the
organization is supposed to identify its various financial resources, human resources, material
resources and non-material resources and then identify the criticality of the solution by asking
questions like, “How valuable is this resource? Is it rare or is it imitable? And, what is it that the
company gains most from it? “

Based on their analysis, they concluded that Dimension Data enjoyed a Temporary Competitive
Advantage, and recommended that the company should try to move their resources to higher
categories so that it became difficult for competitors to copy through L&D programs. They decided
to execute the program in three steps. In the first step, i.e. the pre-program step, the right set of
employees fit for the training would be identified and they would be briefed about the program
through a webinar followed by a pre learning online module. The second step would focus on
enhancing the learning with the help of group activities, live projects etc. Post program, employees
would be evaluated on the basis of company standards and to keep their knowledge updated and
refreshed various media forums and platforms would be created.
KEY INSIGHTS BY THE RUNNER-UP TEAM

They started by listing down the present practices at Dimension Data. Then they proposed a
methodology to boost learning and development with the help of surveys, peer learning programs,
games, hackathons and many such opportunities. These methodologies were substantiated by
providing use cases for each of them, on the basis of which a complete training methodology was
formulated. This training methodology fostered a culture of employee led learning by providing
them on the job training, apprenticeship training, AV based training and stimulated learning and
gaming. Their focus was on creating virtual teams and creating a virtual environment for learning
and having fun with the help of games. They designed a real-time skill repository management
system where they designed schedules on real-time basis after analyzing what was required versus
what was available. And they enlisted the following steps for implementation:

1. Assess employee productivity, the risk of employee leaving;

2. Map the money spent vs the productivity increased in the department/overall;
3. Keep a check on the events planned vs the forthcoming events; and
4. Generate detailed reports for employee/department for senior management.

The speech and voice of the entire document were made homogeneous.