Given the increasing importance of Information Technology in enabling leading businesses and supply chains and the rapidly evolving structure of private sector and public sector organizations driven by constant innovations in the field of IT, there are tremendous scope and value for ground-breaking research in various aspects of IT- enabled logistics and supply chain management. To bring together some of the finest researchers in this area to present their perspectives, an international workshop is being proposed in the IT capital of India, Bangalore, later this year. Thought leaders and accomplished researchers from across the world will congregate to share their findings, unearth path-breaking approaches to shared problems and discover common research interests in the closely inter-related areas of supply chain management, IT enabled logistics, E-business and manufacturing automation. This collective learning process will definitely lead to significant new findings that shall further aid the development and deployment of new IT solutions in Industry. The workshop will be organized over a period of 2 days with a total of 8 sessions that shall be dedicated to exploring the frontiers of IT-enabled logistics and supply chain networks. A pre-workshop tutorial on the basics of IT-enabled logistics and supply chain management will be organized for the benefit of interested workshop participants. A total of 40 prominent speakers will be invited to present their results and share their perspectives. The total number of participants including speakers will be around 150 (40 speakers, 40 faculty members from Indian Universities, 30 Industry participants and about 40 research students). Some of the companies that are expected to participate in this event are i2 Technologies, SAPLabs, Samsung, Motorola, Infosys, Satyam, MindTree, IBM India Research Labs, and GM India Science Labs. In order to achieve the ambitious goals of this workshop, the participation of international experts particularly from the US is absolutely essential. In this regard, NSF funding to provide partial support for the travel and accommodation of US-based researchers attending the event will go a long way in making the event a grand success. It is estimated that support will be required to facilitate the participation of around 10 US- based academicians. The intellectual merit of the proposed workshop is that it brings together leading researchers and industrial thinkers for technical presentation, brainstorming discussions, industrial visit, and workshop publication. The speakers will share some of their most recent research findings to addresses both the IT and the modeling issues, and this will have broad impact on both traditional industries such as automotive, aerospace, apparel, petrochemicals, etc. and also e-business companies. The outcomes of the Workshop will be widely disseminated to scientists and engineers in academia, manufacturing and service industries, and the supporting IT industries through Workshop Proceedings and personal contact. Visits to leading Indian software houses and research institutes and technical discussions among participants would facilitate a better understanding of India IT industry by US researchers, and the establishing an international research network will then have a far and broad impact on international collaboration between the two countries.
