PESTEL Analysis - IT Solutions for SELCO India.

Assignment Taken

Seamless information flow, analysis and presentation of data for SELCO India.

Case Understanding

SELCO India is a rural energy service company, with its headquarters in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. They have installed over 450,000 so called 'expensive' solar solutions for the poor which have been paid for by the poor using various financing methods designed by SELCO India and its financial partners that match their cash flows. They are combining door step service models via energy service centers and hiring local youths to maintain the solar systems in rural areas. Many of the employees of SELCO India are from the local villages adding a sense of trust and responsibility that is crucial when targeting underserved communities. SELCO India has successfully grown many folds over the years while promoting energy services like solar power to the rural poor. It has maintained modest profits in the last 8 years with growth rates at an annual average of 20%. It has reinvested its profits back into the company for further growth. SELCO India has strived and accomplished a very important feet in solar power market, i.e. innovative designs, whatever solution they have offered it was redesigned to meet specific requirement of end-user, be it street vendors, or housewives every customer got benefit from SELCO India's innovation driven product development,. Basis of their design concepts starts from a deep and careful understanding of needs of the poor. Other attribute which contributed to SELCO India's product success is SELCO India's ability to provide a microfinance solution along with its innovative and useful products

BCS Solution Summary

SELCO India has a very well-defined structure of its operations. The main concern would be to expand their market as the key consumers are the far away from the reach or unaware about the existence of such products. We can use IT and digitization to its best to reach out to more and more number of people. We also need to find effective ways to educate the youth, who are going to be the main driving factor of the entire business model. We also need to cater to the language barriers ,when we will use real-time translators to suite their specific needs. MIS will also be a critical aspect in the entire product's timeline. We always need to understand the demand and accordingly adjust the supply. We also beforehand need to estimate the future need to raw materials, where our backend technology can be use to have a future view. We will use Machine learning for predictive analysis. From all the above we do understand that technical intervention is inevitable from SELCO India's roadmap.

Solution

Use of technology to better reach target audience :

• The primary consumers of our SELCO’s products are the rural and lower class urban population. Considering them as our primary rate, we need to keep in mind the low literacy and restricted cultural with language barrier. This audience won’t primarily have the access or knowledge to use the internet. Hence, eliminating the use of websites or social media for marketing. This makes us rely heavily on word of mouth, print media and television. But the next question that arises is how will be identify the geographic regions that we need to target. One solution to this problem is by leveraging regional NGOs operating in those areas. We can arrange webinars in accordance with these NGOs providing some benefit back to the NGOs, to get them on-board. We can host this campaign on different means of media.  The information management system checks which URL has the customer comes from, by checking the Urchin tracking Module (UTM).This gives insight on whether the customer has come from a social media campaign or organically through website/app – updated on “Marketing” MIS Sheet. These NGOs can also help in understanding what exact problem needs to be solved for that set of community. As not all of them have the same need.

 

Technological support to maintain raw materials in inventory :

• Once the target audience has been determined and the product has been sold, we can use machine learning for analysing supply versus demand. We can have a look at the trends in the demand and build our models around it. ML enables a computer system to continue learning and improving on its own, based on experience. Machine learning models are created by studying patterns in the data. Data scientists optimize the machine learning models based on patterns in the data. The process repeats and is refined until the model’s accuracy is high enough for the tasks that need to be done. As and when we will have more clients, we will start receiving more data-sets and more examples and case studies. This will start making the system and software more accurate overtime. Python will be the primary technology used for these models and calculations. Predictive analytics: This capability helps companies predict trends and behavioural patterns by discovering cause-and-effect relationships in data. Recommendation engines: With recommendation engines, companies use data analysis to recommend products that someone might be interested in. Similarly, we can also use one more tool that is based on Machine learning to predict the sales numbers.

 

Automanion and IoT to play critcal role on assembly line :

• Automation and IoT will be used for the assembly at our production unit. This will help minimize the labour cost. Once the assembly is done, the products need to be dispatched to the desired locations. We can keep a schedule of delivering all the products to the consumers once a week. Hence multiple deliveries in the same area can be combined together, reducing the delivery charges for the company.  We can use the shortest distance first algorithm for route optimization. The truck will be enabled with GPS tracking, so that the people of energy service centres keep a track of it, and reach destination whenever required.

 

GPS tracking for delivery managemet system :

• The expert from energy service centre will install everything, give a quick demo of how to use it and all the necessary information. Our target audience as mentioned earlier will rely less on internet, we can develop an offline system to get a feedback from them and provide a platform for them to report any assistance or problem encountered. The audience which we have are also restricted by language barriers. Hence, we can have call centres which have an option of the local languages as well. The feedbacks from here will be pulled into the backend software and used by R&D team.

 

Technology intervention for increased adaptiveness :

• The people at the energy service centres need to be well trained. We can devise a physical training program to make aware of them initially. Once they are at a god stage, they can further deepen their knowledge by having access to our training videos. We again need to think about the language barriers here too. So we can develop a technology to translate these training videos into language of their choice. A real-time voice translator that can translate voice input and give translated voice output generated from it. It is created using google’s googleTrans API and speech_recognition library of python. It converts text from one language to another language and saves its mp3 recorded file. The playsound module is then used to play the generated mp3 file, After that, the generated mp3 file is deleted using the os module.

 

Real-time financial transactions : 

• We also need to develop a software to handle all the financial transactions. The banks or financial institutions through which we are facilitating loans to our customers might not be present in the vicinity.So we can leverage internet banking in this case. The software we develop needs to be robust.  We need to secure the pathways through firewalls, to save the data and money from hackers. We should also have permissions on different levels to have added level of security. The data of these financial transactions can be stored in SQL databases. The advantage of SQL databases is that the retrieving of data back is easier through indexes. The numbers fed back into the system can also be leveraged in MIS by financial department.

Conclusion

SELCO India has a very well-defined structure of its operations. The main concern would be to expand their market as the key consumers are the far away from the reach or unaware about the existence of such products. We can use IT and digitization to its best to reach out to more and more number of people. We also need to find effective ways to educate the youth, who are going to be the main driving factor of the entire business model. We also need to cater to the language barriers ,when we will use real-time translators to suite their specific needs. MIS will also be a critical aspect in the entire product's timeline. We always need to understand the demand and accordingly adjust the supply. We also beforehand need to estimate the future need to raw materials, where our backend technology can be use to have a future view. We will use Machine learning for predictive analysis. From all the above we do understand that technical intervention is inevitable from SELCO India's roadmap.

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