Raghuram, how did the idea of bringing out a book on Logistics and Supply Chain Management come up ?
With my background in Operations Research and interest in transportation and logistics, I had started examining issues related to logistics in the Indian context right from the time I joined the Institute in 1985. From the early times, I got opportunities to work for different companies in the area of logistics. Whenever I worked with a company, I extracted at least one case from the situation because as a consultant, one really had a very good insight of what was going on and proposed solutions to problems. I must admit that in many of these cases, the kind of cooperation and data support I got from the organisations was because there were alumni at senior roles who understood what a case would be. In 15 out of 25 cases in the book, alumni facilitated my work and played a catalytical role. Armed with these initial cases (in their original draft from) and their OR-based analysis, I got the confidence to launch a management development programme (MDP) called Logistics and Physical Distr
