Dr Rajesh Piplani, Associate Professor & Director, Center for Supply Chain Management - NTU

Speaker - Reverse Logistics Conference & Expo

Topic - "Creating Value from Returns - The Design of Service Networks" - Singapore 2007

Dr. Rajesh Piplani is the director of the Center for Supply Chain Management in the school of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NTU. He obtained his M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University in 1990, and his Ph. D. from Purdue University in 1995. Dr. Piplani is listed in Marquis Who is Who in Science and Engineering in USA (1998-1999).

Dr. Piplani's interests are in the area of supply chain management of manufacturing enterprises, logistics planning, and design and analysis of manufacturing systems. Dr. Piplani has published in many international journals and has also presented papers at various Industrial Engineering and Operations Research conferences worldwide.

Dr. Piplani has over seven years of industry experience in India and USA in the areas of Supply-chain management and production planning of power plant equipment and semiconductor fabrication facilities. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of NTU. As deputy Director of the M. Sc. Logistics program, he has designed and taught courses in the area of procurement planning, simulation modeling, inventory and supply-chain management. He is also an associate faculty with the Nanyang Business School, and teaches courses on Supply-chain planning in the MBA program.

Dr Piplani offers open courses for the industry professionals on Supply Chain management and SC modeling and design. He has also offered customized programs for various companies (DHL, TNT, Phillips, Maxtor), and for all the three branches of Singapore Armed Forces (Army, Navy and Air Force).

He consults with the local industry regularly on issues relating to procurement, inventory planning and supply-chain management. He has worked on supply chain modeling and analysis projects with companies in the pharmaceutical, automotive, electronics and beverage industry. For a Singapore based Pharmaceutical distributor, he modeled their as-is and hub-based supply chains and compared their performance based on distribution cost, lead time and service level considerations. For a Singapore-based regional logistics centre of a major automotive company, he has investigated different distribution strategies, including going direct to their customers in neighboring countries. For a beverage producer and distributor, he worked on a team, studying the feasibility of using a hub-based distribution; the company has traditionally used a number of distributors spread all over the island.

He is an associate consultant with Y3 Technologies. He also sits on the eSCM council of Singapore Manufacturers Association and Supply Management Institute of Germany, and is the external examiner for the Logistics Engineering program of Ngee Ann Polytechnic.