Details on Mathura

So my first foray out into the field was semi successful.

I spent Friday in Mathura, and participated in the block manager training. It's interesting to see another company talk about it's values and mission and how that permeates into everything including the training session. The training is really meant to inculcate a sense of pride in what the managers do, because they have to project it to transfer this attitude of self reliance at the rural village level. But instead of going into the details on the training, I think talking about the back end supply chain process is more interesting.

The "call center" is basically a cubicle with 2 computers manned by 5 women. The girls basically call up the rural retailers and take delivery orders. The power went out 3-4 times in the 2 hours I was there, and whenever it went out they lost all the work they were doing in excel (they really need to start using auto save). But apparently this is not a common occurrence, I just happened to come in on a bad day. More interesting was the data entry process. The most time consuming and manual process you can imagine. To enter data for one delivery route take approx 9 hrs worst case. They have 6 delivery routes, so they need to hire 6 data entry operators just to keep up. Currently they have only 3! And I can see why it's so error prone. The poor guys work up till 1 to 3 am and they are behind by 3-4 weeks. It was good to finally observe the process, and see the issues they face.

At the end of the day, I asked the territory manager what delivery car I was going to go out with the next day so I can observe the final delivery leg of the operation. That's when it struck him that there are no delivery's the next day since it was a Saturday. Apparently this small fact had escaped everyone's attention when they planned this trip. So instead of spending the weekend there, I came back the same day.

Regardless, the day I spent there was productive. I'll just have to go back to Mathura sometime this week.