ALUMNI SPEAK: VIVEK KANNAN
SP Jain School of Global Management’s alumnus Vivek Kannan, who started his MGB-SCM in 2013, had an extremely promising career right from 2011. Working at Mu Sigma, Bangalore, he was a part of a team that handled analytics based projects for Walmart. It is during this tenure that he realised that his interests lay in the fields of Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Logistics. It was only natural, then, that Vivek decided to join SP Jain, after hearing about the SCM specialisation course. “This course seemed like the perfect place for me to hone my skills and also obtain a global exposure, as I would be a part of SP Jain’s tri-city model.” Vivek warmly states.
Spending more than a year at SP Jain, Vivek not only refined his own skills, but proficiently picked up a number of new ones too. He excitedly shares with us how his 16-month tenure at SP Jain allowed him to both refine his own skills as well as to pick up a lot of new ones. He always had a penchant for numbers and had a great ability to understand business concepts. “I was surprised at how much I still had to learn during the course of my studies. At SP Jain, I was shown how to understand businesses from a global perspective, rather than a local one which I was accustomed to.” he shares.
SP Jain’s MGB program took Vivek and his classmates to different cities (Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai) every trimester and entailed them working on real world problems with local businesses in all those places. He was also a part of highly intuitive business simulations. He is of the opinion that the business simulations gave them a feel of the dynamic nature of the real world business environment and enhanced their ability to make informed decisions under stress.
Talking about his education at SP Jain, Vivek recollects, “I would be remiss if I did not mention what I felt was the best part about the experience: the faculty. While the other facets of my time at SP Jain are undoubtedly remarkable, I can honestly say that the classes conducted and the business acumen of the professors truly blew me away. Professor Natarajan (Quantitative Techniques), Professor Moradian (Ops Management/Demand Planning) and Professor Aravind (Project Management) are three of the professors who have impacted me the most and established themselves as true role models. I will constantly endeavour to achieve the high standards that they have set.”
Today, as a project manager at Walmart Labs, Vivek’s work involves pricing initiatives and modelling projects for the US stores. Vivek holds his roots at Mu Sigma and his education at SP Jain as crucially responsible for qualifying him for the position. His understanding of the business on a global scale will definitely aid him in producing quality results.
