MIS Reporting Tool and IT Strategy

Assignment Taken

Create and MIS reporting format for efficient reporting

Case Understanding

Fresh Grower intends to deliver products from harvesting to doorstep within 3 hours. However, the ground realities show that the lead time between harvesting and delivery cannot be reduced by 50% so easily, even if business process reengineering is done. Therefore, it is necessary to implement processes that ensure the quality of freshness of vegetables, so that customers get the same level of nutrition and freshness. Fresh Grower lacks a sophisticated comprehensive system that can keep track of when the farm produce was harvested, when it was packed, how its freshness parameters have been during the procurement, packing and storage process, and also how soon it has been delivered. The company also does not have any mechanism to ascertain how much they must harvest everyday and how they must plan for the next day. Fresh Grower needs a MIS Reporting Tool which provides insights into how the farm produce is harvested, how much of orders they get daily and how much time it takes to go on different routes to reach the customers. This will help them find out the bottlenecks in the process and will help in identifying which regions order the most, and where the delivery has to be optimized. At the same time, it will also highlight the processes which lead to a long delay in the entire supply chain. Excessive time is being taken due to real-time dependence on farmers and the manual nature of the harvesting and packing job, which needs to be automated. Fresh Grower needs to invest in machinery and infrastructure that can accelerate the activities of harvesting, packing and sorting. This is where time can be reduced further. However, Fresh Grower cannot always correctly predict how many orders they would get on a particular day. This necessitates having a buffer stock of harvested crops, which have to be preserved well for assurance of freshness and quality. Unless Fresh Grower brings technological interventions in its processes, customer experience and storage, it will continue to face loss of subscription and will remain at a lead time of 6 hours.

BCS Solution Summary

To bring Business Process Reengineering, we need to eliminate some of the 7 wastes of operations management, viz. overproduction, inventory, motion, defects, over-processing, waiting, and transport. To help Fresh Grower turn around its operations, we propose the following: - IoT sensors inside the soil to keep track of quality of the farm produce - Cold storage centers with optimal capacity to store just a little above what is ordered on a particular day - Temperature, pressure and relative humidity inside cold storage refrigerators to keep a tab on quality parameters of stored farm produce Using order history of the past week, Fresh Grower will be able o predict the approximate number of orders it will receive on a particular day. The order, processing and dispatch data will get automatically updated in a database from which the MIS Reporting Tool shall retrieve data and provide a visualization in the dashboard. The MIS Reporting Tool has been attached herewith. The order data of the current day will help in improving the training dataset for Machine Learning prediction models, which provide insights to Fresh Grower on how much farm produce should be optimally kept available to fulfil the orders of the next day. The cash inflows from the payments received by delivery personnel will get fed into the "Inventory" sheet of the MIS Reporting Tool. This sheet will keep a tracker of all the inventory status and will also show which product has fallen below the minimum threshold, so that Fresh Grower can quickly work on harvesting that very same vegetable or fruit the next day to fulfil its inventory. From the Inventory table, the data is fed automatically to the "Budget Reporting" sheet, which helps to keep a track of all the cash flows for the Finance department. The Finance department gets to understand how it is performing on cash inflows and outflows, as compared to its estimates. Moreover, customers will order food from the app or from social media platforms after clicking on some marketing campaign, which will also be tracked using Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) at the end of the URLs. This data will get fed into the "Marketing" sheet through the database layer. Eventually, the Returns of Marketing Investments will be available for visualization and analysis, that will further bring efficiencies in marketing campaigns. In the "Logistics" sheet, the data will get updated as and when farm produce is harvested, stored in refrigerators, procured back from inventory, packed and delivered. This sheet in the MIS Reporting Tool will help gain insights on which activity is becoming a bottleneck and where more personnel or technological investments are required. Once any HR bottleneck is identified using data analysis from MIS Reporting Tool, the HR department will be notified for personnel hiring.

Solution

The solution from an IT perspective revolves around bringing automation, intelligence and storage in the entire process. Let's look at each one of them from an IT perspective and understand how a MIS Reporting Tool can be beneficial for the requirements.

Automation: Fresh Grower is lacking automation tools for the harvesting, packing and sorting process. Manual labor is leading to waste of waiting and motion in the entire process. farm produce needs to move faster from the farm to the packing center, whereas it is taking 2.5 hours for the same. At the same time, packing and sorting takes another 2 hours, which can be minimized using automated machines for accelerated sorting and packing. Companies like Fresh Plaza, Unisorting and Unitec provide semi-automatic and fully-automatic machines to conduct the sorting and packing of items in a much reduced time, and can pack 1000 pouches per hour. This shows how automated machines can bring down packing time drastically, though it will need initial investments of around INR 5-6 lakhs per machine. Moreover, tractors and mechanized harvesters can help in quick harvesting of crops from the farmland, instead of spending an hour there.

Storage: Fresh Grower cannot always predict how much it must harvest and it may so happen sometimes that customers order something at such times during the day when farmers are not willing to harvest crop or are away from farmland. This requires Fresh Grower to harvest an optimal amount of crop on a periodic basis, like once daily or weekly. However, this will require careful storage of the farm produce in a cold refrigeration system. Therefore, Fresh Grower needs to invest in setting up small refrigeration units wherever it intends to operate. It can store a specific amount of farm produce according to what the Machine Learning models recommend. The freshness of the vegetables and fruits will have to be ensured and therefore, the refrigeration units must be equipped with IoT sensors to track the ambient temperature, relative humidity and the pressure inside the refrigeration units. The sensors will transmit important real-time data to a backend database over a 4G network once every hour. The backend system will keep a track of the environment parameters and will alert whenever the parameters have an anomaly.

Intelligence: Based on historical order data, the ML models will recommend how much farm produce must be harvested the next day and how much should be stored as a buffer stock. This will ensure that Fresh Growers store only minimal amount of farm produce in the refrigerators for those orders that arrive at odd times during the day. The entire data on environment parameters, available inventory and payments will be stored in the database and will be made available in the MIS Reporting Tool.

 

The tool will help to visualize which processes are taking unnecessary long times and how lead times can be reduced. This will help eliminate the wastage of inventory, overproduction and defects. Moreover, the Finance team will be able to see how cash outflows and inflows look like. The Marketing team will be able to visualize which channels have contributed to the new and repeat orders, and which platform they are arriving from. The Urchin Tracing Module (UTM) in the URLs used to place the orders will help in tracking of marketing campaigns. Therefore, Marketing team will be able to bring efficiencies to its marketing campaigns and portfolio of channels to drive omni-channel strategy.

Tracking of Inventory will help the supply chain personnel to bring efficiencies in their processes by identifying and eliminating bottlenecks in the value chain. The operations will be made more efficient with the help of the MIS Reporting Tool. Overall, the automation, intelligence and storage facilities will bring in a transformative business process reengineering, that Fresh Grower can leverage to expand to more areas and drive economies of scale. 

Expansion Strategy:

• The expansion strategy takes into consideration all the cost heads mentioned in the Business Case Scenario, along with additional costs of hiring engineers, setting up cold storages and implementation of IoT infrastructure.
• Appropriate and conservative CAGR has been assumed for subscribers' base, salary of personnel and other cost heads over each quarter, wherever applicable.
• The 2-year breakeven strategy shows that breakeven will happen in Jul-Sep '22 quarter and thereafter, net income will increase gradually for Fresh Grower. 

Management principles: 

Seven wastes of operations management, viz. overproduction, inventory, motion, defects, over-processing, waiting, and transport 

• Value chain traceability and supply chain optimization 
• Route optimization for last mile delivery 
• Automation and Centralization of reporting 
• Transparency in scalar chain 
• Omni-channel marketing strategy 

 

Conclusion

Fresh Grower needs to invest in technological interventions to enable Business Process Reengineering in its daily operations. Storage facilities will help it to eliminate the time taken daily for harvesting and packing, thereby reducing order-to-delivery time to 1.5-2 hours maximum. Simultaneously, automation in the harvesting and packing space will help to reduce time in these processes, compared to manual labor. Furthermore, the tracking of time taken to deliver the products to different PIN codes will help Fresh Grower to optimize the last-mile distribution network though route optimization strategies. It is high time that Fresh Grower invests in technological solutions and enables itself with MIS reporting Tool to gain visibility into the granular aspects of the entire value chain.

Attached File Details