by diana | Feb 7, 2012 | Blog, Jan '12 India Trip, Thoughts and Ideas
Shortly after reaching Chennai’s main railway station, I grabbed a pre-paid auto rickshaw to IIT Madras. I had a meeting with Ashutosh Sinha from Villgro Stores. The meeting turned out to be quite thought-provoking. For example, Ashutosh brought up that when you think...
by diana | Feb 7, 2012 | Blog, Jan '12 India Trip
The important Essmart-related meeting of the day was with Logistimo. Logistimo develops mobile phone applications to assist with supply chain management and logistics. They specialize in rural distribution, which is what Essmart is interested in. We were introduced to...
by diana | Feb 2, 2012 | Blog, Jan '12 India Trip, Thoughts and Ideas
I met Grace, the MIT alum I had met in Hubli, at SELCO’s main office in JP Nagar. I always enjoy visiting SELCO. We talked with some people from the SELCO Foundation, which is the arm of SELCO that supports Ujire’s SELCO Labs. I asked a lot of questions about after...
by diana | Jan 31, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip
We began our surveys with help from SELCO Lab employees and some students who are helping them out. The morning was spent going over the surveys. I could kind of see a slight clash of interests, as what we’re doing as a distributor of products is quite different from...
by diana | Jan 28, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip, Thoughts and Ideas
Something we’ve learned out here in Pollachi is that warrantees are absolutely necessary. Every customer asks, “Does this come with a warranty?” or “Where can we fix this?” For Essmart, we need to think about having a service center for all of these technologies in...
by diana | Jan 28, 2012 | Blog, Field Notes, Jan '12 India Trip
This was an exciting day for Essmart. The inventory experiment begins (although on a very limited scale)! In the morning, we met with our students to demonstrate the different products. Afterward, they gathered more products from Prashanth’s car and went off, two by...
