onfederation of Indian Industry's Institute of Logistics is offering a distance learning diploma and post-graduate diploma courses in Supply Chain Management. These courses have been developed in response to the feedback from industrial practitioners in recent years.

The diploma course, being offered along with the Indian Institute of Materials Management, will be for two semesters while the post-graduate diploma will be a four-semester course. The programme would have a structured content with case studies, assignments and a well-defined evaluation process.

The governance system for this course has a policy committee and an education council to drive value, the representatives of which have been drawn from academia and industry to ensure that the programme contains theoretical and conceptual materials derived from industry experience.

In the last two decades, manufacturing and service industries have been occupied with firm-level improvement strategies such as Manufacturing Resource Planning, Just-In-Time systems and Business Process Reengineering.

In recent years, however, the need to improve inter-firm communication and co-ordination along the supply chain has come to be realised as the new frontier in improving operations management.

The objective of the programme is to train graduates who are primed to assume leadership positions in SCM, manufacturing and service operations management.

The programme is targeted at junior level executives, middle level managers and supervisors.

The first batch for both the diploma and PG diploma courses will commence from January 2005 the registration for which is open till December 31.