Reflection Paper

By: Arjun Vijayakumar (BL.BU.P2MBA19016)

Week 3 (August 19th):

We learnt about how alliance management and how it is evaluated. When an alliance is formed it is
necessary to monitor and coordinate alliance activities. One which I understood mostly was
relational governance which comes under approaches to managing alliances. It is always crucial to
have a mutual understanding between the partners. Even doing a team based project in class, I
didn’t notice that mutual understanding is a crucial factor. But now I understood that partners must
have sort of trust and mutual understanding between them. A partner must make adjustments in
order to understand the dynamic changes happening in an environment. Whatever work we are
doing, it is necessary to ensure we have a commitment towards a goal. That helped me understand
why these factors are very important for myself and the future.

Week 4 (August 27th):

We understood about the distribution channels, their designs and about gap analysis. We had an
idea about segmentation works. Before, what I had learnt was about differentiating customers based
on the demand. But here it is based on how the customer wants to buy a product. In marketing, it is
done based on what the customer wants to buy. Also, about channel flows, it is important that we
consider key factors when there is flow of goods such as Physical Possession, ownership, promotion,
negotiation, financing, risking, ordering and payment. I didn’t have a proper idea about how the flow
works, didn’t know these factors were to be considered in a flow. Now I got a rough idea about how
a channel flow works.

In gap analysis we learnt about how source of gaps, types of gaps, closing gaps works. How it works
when reverse logistics happen. We learnt about the difference between the Demand Side Gaps and
Supply Side Gaps. In order to identify gaps, we must look at the competitors’, how they are doing
and analysing them to understand that we are also lacking in that particular field. We will have a
good understanding of how the competitors work so that we can reduce the gap.