Impact of Conronavirus on Supply Chain Operations in China

Dr.D.SathishKumar, Professor, SIMS

          The Coronavirus has been a wreaking disaster on a global basis as it has spread exponentially across continental lines causing stocks to stumble, supply chains to slow and transportation operations to be disrupted. China is also known as a key supplier of materials for electronic, pharmaceuticals and automotive supply chains. The cause or the impact of the virus has closed many public venues temporarily. People travelling from china have endorsed measures to test the virus. There are over 13 million people residing in Wuhan and 16 other cities have been locked to protect people from virus.

List of top companies and their current situations and decisions:

• Honda has  withdrawn its staff and families from Wuhan
• Peugeot also has withdrawn staff and families from Wuhan
• H&M Closed its 13 stores from Wuhan
• McDonald’s has closed some restaurants across 5 cities
• Starbucks closed its Wuhan outlet.
• Nike store in china have been shut down

If the Virus continues to spread, more and supply chain will be affected such as operations involving labour, supplies, production and transport etc.

Entertainment:

            Disney: More than a week, theme parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong have been shut down. The operating income has been to reduce $175 Million. I MAX has postpone the release of five films it had planned to showcase in china.

            Wynn Resorts: Is losing $2.4 million to $2.6 million every day.

Technology:

Apple: Apple remains closed and that traffic into its stores in the country had fallen off.

Qualcomm: Smartphone chips are also shutting down.

Automobile:

            Tesla, Ford and Nissan: Auto plant has also closed down its operations in china

            Hyundai, Volkswagen: The nationwide operations has limited its travel options for the production employees in china.

Financial Planning for new Tax Regulations

Dr. Priya Kalyanasundaram

             Our Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman presented the first Union Budget 2020 on February 1, 2020 in the parliament after BJP led government came to power for the second term during general elections 2019 . So there were many expectations from the budget. This budget proposed a new tax scheme with 6 different slabs for individual tax payers as compared to 3 slab scheme currently applicable. The option was given to the individual to decide which scheme of tax, either the old one or the new, is beneficial for him.

The process of payroll function needs to be tweaked to accommodate the choice of the individual employee who wishes to opt for new scheme of taxation. Further, this declaration of choosing between old and new scheme has to be taken each year. Under the new scheme, the taxpayer will have to give up many of the exemptions and deductions that were offered in the older system to avail the benefits of lower tax rates.

The Table 1 below gives us a comparative tax structure applicable to employees under new and old scheme. The surcharge and cess on tax will be applicable at existing rates. The individual also has  to do his tax planning well in advance to make declaration with his employer.

Existing tax regime vs. new tax regime

Old Regime		New Regime
Income Slabs	Rate of tax	Income Slabs	Rate of tax
Up to INR 250000	0	Up to INR 250000	0
INR 2,50,001 to 5,00,000	5%	INR 250001 to 500000	5%
INR 5,00001 to 10,00,000	20%	INR 5,00,001 to 7,50,000	10%
Above INR 10,00,000	30%	INR7,50,001 to 10,00,000	15%
		INR10,00,001 to INR 12,50,001	20%
		INR 12,50,001 to 15,00,000	25%
		Above 15,00,000	30%

The exemptions and deductions that would not be available to the employee under new tax regime are house rent allowance, leave travel concession for domestic travel once in a block of two years, standard deduction from salaries, professional tax, interest on borrowed capital for buying house property, deductions from Gross Total Income under chapter VI A on account of investments made in tax saving the various instruments like PPF, EPF, life insurance premium etc.  The HR department have to be aware that the employee can change this option every year if he/she does not have income from business or profession.

Action Points for the HR team:

• They need to arrange an expert talk for the employees to understand the new tax regime vs. old tax regime
• Organize training session for the HR and accounts department’s employees that deal with tax computations for individuals as well as deal with corporate taxes
• Connect with the information technology payroll software provider to make changes to the payroll software to take care of the changes as per the budget 2020
• Offering  comparative tax liability calculation as per old scheme and new scheme to every employee, if possible

If organizations begin early, they can effectively engage with the employees in their financial planning and avoid last minute hassles to comply with the new regulations.

NOVEL CORONAVIRUS – ECONOMY IMPACT

Prof. S. Thilak, Assistant Professor, SIMS

 

In recent days we all hear and fear of that one word– Novel Coronavirus which has been originated from Wuhan, China during December 2019. This deathly disease has spread beyond Wuhan to Beijing, Shanghai, and other parts of country such as Thailand, Japan, Singapore, South Korea even some cases were found in France, Germany and United States. Now recently some cases have been identified in India and they have been isolated for treatment.

 

Does the Economic Impact of Coronavirus could be bigger than SARS 2003?

            Due to SARS outbreak in 2003 the China’s GDP has been jumped 2 percentage points from the Q1 to the Q2 in 2003. Based on Nomura, the assumption of actual GDP growth in 2020 has dropped from 6% pace which has achieved in Q4 in 2019. Which is higher than the 2 percentage points which happened during SARS outbreak in 2003. This is because of temporary shock wave of coronavirus both demand and supply leave a long-lasting impact.

            The range of current slowdown and time to recovery can be determined only by controlling this deadly coronavirus will remain same.

 

Travel plunges and Services froze

            Especially during the festive season Lunar New Year Holiday people used to travel to their home country, but presently China has now slowdown their travel plunges and services has been frozen , due to this huge out break people have been halted in their places . Travel Plunges were 28.8% when compared to the past. To be specific travel plunges were 41.6% in civil travel, 41.5% in rail travel & 25% in Road transport. In addition to this almost travel restrictions were around 20 cities.

To conclude the overall Capital Economic Impact compared to the SARS break-out in 2003 was lowered by 3 percentage points in a quarter and presently the overall economy has been  slowdown to  8%. Today, whatever happens to China’s economy it will have a larger effect on the rest of the world. The virus’ spreading has come to a fear of a global economic slowdown.

Coaching – An effective leadership development tool

Dr.S.SUNDARARAJAN

Associate Professor – MBA

Introduction

Effective coaching is about achieving goals. The coach helps the employee set meaningful ones and identify specific behaviors or steps for meeting them and also clarifies milestones or measures of success and holds the employee accountable for them. we should seed our organization with coaching role models

Key Coaching Skills

Goal-setting: Coaching is a goal-focused (or solution-focused) approach, so the ability to elicit clear, well-defined and emotionally engaging goals from a coachee is one of the most important skills for a coach to possess. The following are the key coaching skills like Looking, Listening, Empathizing, Questioning, Giving feedback, Intuiting, Checking Etc.

Principles for successful coaching

• The Coaching Spirit.
• Relationship and Trust.
• Asking Questions and Curiosity.
• Listening and Intuition.
• Feedback and Awareness.
• Suggestions and Simplification.
• Goals and Action Plans.
• Accountability and Accomplishments.

 

Success Coaching: It is done through dialogue, inquiry, goal setting, accountability and general motivational techniques, the Coach supports the client to assume full responsibility for creating a fulfilling life. He also helps people to set better goals and then reach those goals

Probably the most widely known and used model is the GROW coaching model. This simple model helps the coach to take care of your coachee from goal setting,

The 5 Essentials to Effective Coaching

Build trust by developing a real relationship. The best leaders concentrate more on their team’s success than their own.

• Listen, listen, and listen.
• Use positivity as your base.
• Aim for one target.
• Be a consistent presence.

How should companies provide coaching?

• Decide what you want to accomplish.
• Set a goal with your employees.
• Make a roadmap for reaching the goal with milestones along the way.
• Give feedback.
• Make sure your coaching is aligned with your company’s core values.

 

Benefits of Coaching for Individuals

• Establish and act towards achieving goals. Coaching gives the individual an opportunity to define their career goals in a realistic way.
• Increased engagement.
• Safe Place to Gain Perspective.
• Deeper Level of Learning.
• Build Personal Awareness.
• Support for Improving Specific Skills.

Endnote:

Coach practitioners have a great deal of flexibility when working with coaching models. The client’s experience is underpinned by a range of factors, including culture, education, life experience and personality. Leadership can also be developed by strengthening the connection and alignment of the efforts of individual leaders and the systems through which they influence organizational operations. Each and every process which is done by leader and  play a major role for the individual personal development, team development and company development.

 

 

Image Mining

Dr.K.ThirugnanaSambanthan, Assistant Professor, SIMS

 Image mining is an important principle for gaining knowledge of images. It collects patterns of images which satisfy the properties of a given image and these patterns are useful to retrieve images.  The mining system incorporates computer vision, artificial intelligence and database. It finds all patterns without additional knowledge of image. It handles image notation in databases produced by indexing methods. It  is also a complicated process since it combines distinctive methods and the success of Image mining depends on the proficient approach yielding patterns and knowledge of images.

 Mining system considers problems geometric transformation, noise and other distortions of images. The images are obtained by semantic image interpretation and the results of mining can be checked with the model description and features which may be symbols or verbal terms.

 EXISTING IMAGE RETRIEVING SYSTEMS

Retrieval of image is through the description of images many image retrieval systems; say Google or Yahoo search images encompasses metadata.. It has to traverse a huge collection of digital images for identifying resultant image. Sometimes image similarity is motivated to archive images and also text based image filtering clinch image acquisition from web tags are defined with images to fulfill the venture of getting images. Many algorithms are making use of visual and text metadata for searching.    Image retrieval is also effectuated by Query By Image Content (QBIC). The problems of searching digital images in huge databases are resolved by this principle. This approach is a complement to traditional image processing system. Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is another name of QBIC. Human cannot manually annotate the image by entering the keywords since data is very large and the resultant image is not the desired one.

 Image Mining software is the need of the hour as more searches are done using images and regarding image.

Breakthrough in Healthcare IT

Ms.V.Vidhya, Assistant Professor, SIMS

Technology in Healthcare is rapidly changing the expectations of Patients. Greater the technological advancement in the Healthcare sector greater will be the advancements in Medical science. It is the area which involves design, development and usage of Information technology which will enhance the Healthcare. Automated technologies improve the medical care, patient satisfaction, increase efficiency, lower cost, reducing medical errors and improves Public health.  Emergence of AI is another factor that makes the Healthcare IT industry to set up the high limits on patient satisfaction. Some of the advancements in Healthcare IT are given below:

Internet of Medical Things:

Usage of Internet of Medical Things enables the doctor to monitor the patient  and can handle any issues related to appointments. Telemedicine is the one of the versions of this IOMT. Patients are handled remotely from their own place by the concerned physicians. All the reports of the concerned patients are uploaded in the system and it will be viewed by physicians while consultation.  Online appointment system is also an innovation in healthcare IT.  Wherever the patient may be even abroad, the patient can fix an appointment through the hospital website. Patients can also use IT for fixing medication remainders, revisit consultations to their personal device also and also some devices can detect people if they fall especially in geriatric patients.

AI for better Diagnosis:

Recent advancements in technology had paved way for Artificial Intelligence to get a space in the Medicine. Nowadays we have known about the news of a robot conducting a surgery for the patient. This technology has become popular as it reduces human errors in the surgery of a patient. AI also helps patients to receive correct diagnosis. Scientists working hard to train AI to recognise mental illness with the help of radiological images. Anyway, AI cannot replace the doctors but with influence of AI the doctors can provide correct prognosis for the patients.

Electronic Health Records

In recent years manual patient records are not existing instead EHR is introduced in the medical field. In this module patient records are collected, stored and retrieved whenever it is required. It is an efficient way to maintain patient records. But this is system is in controversy as consultant spend their valuable time by just typing each patient records in the module. New innovations like voice recognitions, wearable health devices can be used in future to update the patient records. The Emergence of AI will automate the maintenance of patient records with the new innovations.

Improved Prosthetics

Technology in Medical field has improved in huge way whereby it has paved way for helping the handicaps also. In recent years technologist has developed artificial skin which restores the sense to touch for the users. Many artificial limbs are been innovated for people who want to live their life in all possible way they want to and these prosthetics are much cheaper also.

Self – Service Kiosks

It is one of the Portal technologies which is used to automate patient registration.  Patient need not wait for registration and they can use the automated machines to register their name in the hospital. This reduces the patient registration waiting time.

TRANSFORMATION OF LOGISTICS WITH MODERN TECHNOLOGY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

-Dr.D.SathishKumar

 

Technology development in the field of Logistics integration with big data, cloud computing, connectivity etc, have made the performance are more favourable than the previous endeavours. Artificial Intelligence (AI), block chain has fragmented the logistics market. In this competitive business world companies which follows global supply chains has the highest pressure to deliver quality service at lower cost to the customers.

The main criteria and constrain of the logistics is to save the time and reduce cost; AI provides a solution to save time , reduce cost and also to provide productivity, accuracy with cognitive automation. The Capabilities of AI are ramping up company efficiencies in the areas of predictive demand and network planning. Industries are modifying how resources can be used for maximum benefit and how AI can do the equations faster and in a more perfect. The impact of Big Data is allocating logistics companies to predict high precise outlooks and optimize prospect concert better than before. Providing fresh data has developed into an important step for AI in logistics companies as many of them do not have exploitable figures to realize.

Logistics service contributor companies depend on third party logistics together with common carriers, subcontract staffs, charter airlines and other parties to operate their functions of their business. This increases trouble on logistics accounting teams to process many invoices once a year from thousand of vendors, partners/ providers.  AI technologies can access information such as address, dates, amounts billed, information on accounts parties involved from unstructured invoice received by the company. Global Logistics and supply chain management operators manage large volume of products and use large fleets of vehicles and networks of facilities worldwide. In this logistics industry major challenge is maintaining address information for the successful delivery of shipments.

AI is able to maintain data platforms and create dataset to regulate patterns and anomalies, these patterns are based on predictive analysis. To save time, money and growth of the technology companies are adding AI to their supply chain, to track how, when and where   to send a package to a certain place. Technologies are also providing an opportunity for different levels of optimization in manufacturing, logistics, warehousing and last mile delivery that could become a reality in less than a year with the high set up costs determining early adoption in logistics. Demand delivery will help consumers to have their goods delivered where they need with an flexible courier services.

Benefits of finance education for student’s life

S.SARAVANAN, Professor, SIMS

Financial education is the possession of the set of skills and knowledge that allows an individual to make them informed and to take effective decisions with all of their financial resources. It plays a vital role in today’s digital information world which helps in grasping the student community with a publicity that creates environment for quintessential questioning and decision on how to cope with the  better resources. If the college students are no longer aware of monetary concepts it will have an effect on the first-rate of lifestyles and opportunities.

Taxes

Taxes performs foremost factors in the financial education, Colleges need to provide monetary training to students in managing the month-to-month budgets and this will  serves as the exceptional and efficient way to handle the budget. So when the college students get into the job it will facilitate him to cope with the taxes.

Budgets:

Budget also helps the students to understand and manage the financial resources and also assist them with the  technological know-how which helps in creating a  discipline toward all the elements in life.

Savings:

For each economic selection saving plays a necessary role, but most students do no longer recognize the significance of saving which creates an unsecured lifestyle. Students must begin the savings from the early so that it can have lasting monetary impression.

Investment

The economic training makes the difference between saving and investment. This saving will help to control the future and discover a variety of options so that students can make right investment for their future betterment.

                                                                Programmatic Advertising

Ms.K.Sindhuja, Assistant Professor,SIMS

 

     Programmatic advertising helps to automate the decision-making process of buying media by targeting specific audiences and demographics. Programmatic Advertisements are done with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Real-Time Bidding. It is also supportive for online display, social media advertising, mobile and video campaigns, and now it is expanding to next level in advertising field.

Effectiveness of Programmatic Advertising:

       Programmatic Advertising allows the marketers to reach their target audience effectively and efficiency at scale, but ultimately creativity needs to work in harmony with programmatic discipline in order to maximize advertising effectiveness.

      Programmatic Advertising brings data into the advertisement-buying equation and makes both the automated and programmable process through algorithms and software platforms. This cuts out the key element of the old advertisement-buying interaction that was required by a salesperson and makes the whole process more efficient and effective.

Frequent users of Programmatic Advertising:

Facebook Advertising is a form of Programmatic Advertising i.e. (Mobile Advertising) with its primary function as a social network, there is the necessity to ensure that advertising shown on the platform  is both non-intrusive and  also be able to creat-e the results what it’s advertisers require.

 Ad-Words from Google was primarily built around search, keywords, and text ads. While, Programmatic advertising are built around display ads. Programmatic Advertisements can reach 98% of the internet, including the Google platform allowing 15 billion impressions and counting.

Sentiment analysis and programmatic advertising:

In the context of programmatic advertising, sentiment analysis involves identifying the mood of the customer who is about to see an ad, as well as that user’s likelihood of entering into a transaction in response to that ad

Conclusion:

AI is taking over the repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing up advertisers to focus on the more strategic and creative elements of their work. In future, as AI becomes more sophisticated, one of the challenges will be to decide exactly which tasks should be delegated to AI and which all  tasks to be done by humans. In the context of advertising, AI is there to enhance the work done by humans, not to replace it.-

 

Job Hopping a New trend

Dr. Priya Kalyanasundaram, Professor, SIMS

 

The disgrace of being a job-hopper has become a thing of past perhaps nowadays it shows job hoppers are ambitious and ready to test new waters?

Job-hopping has been on a rise in recent years as many of them have changed their ideas of staying in one company for decades as the case earlier it used to be. This job change according to them doesn’t necessarily have any major effects on their career and they are not even worried on how it looks on their resume or how future employers will perceive them. One of the basic reasons for this change in perception is attributed to millennials who represent a major share of the workforce. As they are motivated to move on for better career option rather than getting stuck in one job for a number of years.

What makes people hop jobs?

Every individual has different opinion that makes them switch jobs. It might be the sector they work in like design and technology or demands which keep them abreast with the developments as compared to other industries. Then there are also emotions that also come into play .This shows that optimists often tend to see opportunities in new jobs and so they are ready to chase,  whereas person  who look for job security   stick to their current jobs.

People who are open to change tend to look at opportunities as the way forward in their career. They like enjoying learning new things and like to see themselves growing professionally.  In case of a job hopper, they learn quickly in the beginning because there’s a fire in them to learn as fast as they can and impress the employer. However, once they know how to do their job they feel bored. It is this new job opportunities which then entice them once again to take on a fresh set of challenges.

In the end, it all comes down to one thing: a job hopper may have many different enthusiasm but at least they are very much self-aware, writing their own narratives and unafraid of being stereotyped. As they are fearless and overcoming the stereotypes along the way. Surprisingly employers have also begun to see them as an asset rather than a liability.