My not so profound thoughts about New Year, Christmas and Diwali greetings!

After getting a deluge of Xmas and New Year greetings over sms, email and LinkedIn messages, I asked myself on the last day of 2010 – “What purpose sending holiday greetings actually serve? Is it good or bad – effective or just a waste of time, energy and effort?

Thinking about the good side was simple and a straight forward one.

Sending holiday greetings is a great opportunity to show someone’s ‘human’ side, consolidate some loyalty for one’s business or simply convey a special holiday or post-holiday offer to improve one’s sales. Besides, these messages do convey I or we exist feeling.

This is what I believe millions of people and businesses, particularly boutique sized and small businesses, have in mind when they send holidays greetings. This sounds pretty good and simple in theory, right?

Well, one little unrelated incident this Xmas evening set my nut rolling to think about the greyer side of such greetings.

4.45 PM. 25^th December 2010. I received following freak short message on my cell phone.

“Could not connect you over phone. Seriously hurt my ankle. Need medical treatment fast. Come back home immediately. Papa”.

Thank God this message was not for me. I was the papa who could have sent this message to my son but I was all right with no ankle damage. Besides my own papa, who lives separately with my Mom 300 Kms away from Delhi, doesn’t use a cell phone and would not have called me over an sms.

But what brought out the inhuman side of this innocent but urgent sms was the fact that I saw this message on 26^th night while pressing the ‘delete” button 45^th time. Whether the real recipient got back home well in time to nurse his father, I’ll never know.

Do we really read all of those Xmas and holiday greetings – be sms or emails? We’d be fooling ourselves if our answer is in affirmative. Particularly when they all have a familiar subject line like “Happy Diwali” or “Happy New Year!” which leaves us wondering what little surprises await us in the body of the message.

By delving further into the futility of sending and receiving such greetings I have come to the conclusion that the sending holiday greeting with the positive side in your mind is pointless and irrelevant. It does not ever serve the intended purpose but do create some additional work for recipients – like deleting. Moreover, some important messages like the one mentioned above may go undelivered, unread or simply marked as spam. Last year I missed an important New Year dinner invitation as I did not go through the full message but deleted it like similar others.

I think it is simply the user friendliness of modern ICT that prompts us to press the “send” button. Or is it a marketing mania created by 21^st century Telecommunication companies? I really miss those few but really meaningful paper greeting cards.

So taking a mantle of change maker from this New Year’s onwards I have decided to do away with sending holiday greetings. Sorry folks who have taken time, money and effort to send me your greetings. No more greetings from me.

Holiday greetings are just as silly as those ‘silly love songs’ we have grown with.

Happy deleting!

Considering requests from many across the country I am posting here two presentations I made at recently held events in Delhi. Trust these presentations shall be of some interest to other visitors also.

First event was NATCOM 2011 on 3^rd December 2011 which was hosted by IIMM (Indian Institute of Materials Management) where I spoke on supply chain fundamentals for organized food retail and food service industry.

The second event NE Connect on 22^nd December 2011 was jointly hosted by NSFI (National Skill Foundation of India) and NERAMC (North Eastern Regional Agricultural Marketing Corporation Ltd where I spoke on Strengthening Input Delivery mechanisms in North East India.

Both these presentations were built over the hands-on experience and insights gained at two of my recent projects – one far away in East Europe for a multinational retailer and another nearer home in Tamil Nadu for a large NGO.

Those who don’t want to run through the presentations can go scan through brief synopsis of same at the end of this post.

NATCOM 2011

NE Connect

NATCOM 2011

Building on the theme of supply chain turnaround workshop conducted last year, gist was presented as an abridged mystical case study. Synopsis of the presentation follows.

Supply Chain Management as a business strategy rests on 4 Pillars

• Cross-company / business group process
• Integrated Supply Processes with best-in-class Suppliers
• Alliances – internal & external
• World-class Supply Chain Management techniques

These pillars have to be woven around a thread called VRE to build world class food supply chains. V here stands for value creation while R is for relationships and E for efficiency.

NE Connect

Taking cues from the initiatives taken by the Tamil Nadu NGO a theme was built around the strong need to mainstream poor Small Horticultural Producers in North East India into booming Indian Economy with Knowledge Based Marketing & Decision Enabling Systems.

The a mantra for success (if well executed) could be:

• Organizing small farmers into business groups using strategic f+v crops in a holistic, integrated and harmonized manner within the farming systems, and get their businesses registered for legal standing – let’s say as Producer Companies.
• Assisting groups to profile their baseline and establish baseline data that will be used to develop vision based business plans and implementation strategies
• Assisting groups to develop survival, working capital accumulation and production enhancement strategies and action plans

Who would be best suited to become catalyst and also gainers from this enabling initiative in NE India.

NGOs or Financial institutions or Private Sector Input / Service Providers or Food MNCS – who strongly believe that:

• farmer and other stakeholders empowerment is a viable enterprise for improving livelihoods
• raising farm productivity of small holders shall win them their future customers
• Willing to invest their own resources till positive results are achieved
• Don’t want have vested interest in the Chain (no ownership of the product or process)

The need for empowerment however has to emerge from within NE India like it did in case of AMUL in Gujarat.

Few weeks back at a conference I was almost shouted down when I began opposing organic food.

My main arguments were on the near impossibility of producing REAL organic food in an ever shrinking land holdings and cost of production, which in my view, shall remain prohibitive because of low productivity – unless of course one allows GM seeds under organic regime.

Genuine organic stuff would require one to maintain isolation distances so that so though harmful chemicals in soil, air and underground water aquifers from inorganic neighbors don’t creep in one’s organic production systems. 

Obviously, I could not find an ally at that conference. Yesterday however I found one when I stumbled upon a Washington Post article at http://is.gd/eru8Ve 

What a solid argument? Definitely organic movement and opposition to GM seeds is against hunger and poverty.

Ongoing debate notwithstanding, cabinet has given a much awaited nod to increase in FDI in retail – 51% in multi brand and 100% in single brand. For common man, this means that there will be more malls and for the informed it means India could soon have the likes of Tesco, Ikea, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Starbucks, Carrefour, etc setting shops in India. Viva la consumerism!

This decision shall surely impact logistics and supply chain services, my consulting bread & butter. But how? Following reflections gathered from the historical evidence across geographies shall help build up a near foreseeable scenario.

The deepest impact of more supermarkets shall be on retail procurement systems. Read on…

When the number of stores in a given supermarket chain grows, there is a tendency to shift from a fragmented single store replenishment system to a distribution center serving several stores in a given catchment, and eventually the whole country. The catchment of a distribution center or set of them usually starts as the zone (such as Delhi NCR) and then widens to several distribution centers representing a centralized system for procurement over all zones across country.

This de-fragmentizes, integrates and centralizes the procurement system over the country. This comes with fewer procurement officers and increased use of centralized warehouses. Increased levels of centralization may also occur in the procurement decision making process, and in the physical produce distribution.

Centralization increases efficiency of procurement by reducing coordination and other transaction costs, although it may increase transport costs by extra movement of products.

The next, and economically logical, step is Internationalization to set up regional distribution centers to allow coordinated procurement over few countries. A logical further extension is insertion into global procurement networks.

More supermarkets shall mean shift from reliance on traditional wholesale to use of non-traditional – specialized/dedicated wholesalers and logistics firms.

This means that a shift from dependence on traditional wholesale markets and brokers towards use of specialized/dedicated wholesalers who are specialized in a product category and are dedicated to the supermarket/s as main supplier.

These specialized wholesalers shall cut transaction, coordination, and search costs, and enforce private standards and contracts with suppliers on behalf of the supermarkets.

Retail chains increasingly outsource logistics and wholesale distribution function sometimes to a sister company within the same holding company or enter into JVs with other firms.

Retail procurement system shall see a shift from wholesale markets to contracts or preferred suppliers in the products / categories where there is greatest need for quality and consistency, and where farmers or processors are associated collectively or are individually large to lower the transaction costs.

Finally the retail procurement system change shall see the rise of standards both in quality and packaging and also enforcement of public standards. To me this can be a biggest game changer which sadly has not yet been fully understood and appreciated by many including large corporations where the writer has worked or consulted.

Well, if you agree with above premise and are expert in reading between the lines, you would have understood by now that, left alone to move on their own inertia, small farmers, small suppliers and small retailers for that matter, will have little room for maneuver in such a scenario. However, there is a silver lining. These small business entities can coalesce to form larger groups (producer companies for eg) that can eventually become knowledge based producers and suppliers to these growing supermarket chains with increased bargaining power. Time to do it is NOW. Interested to implement such a solution to milk the development utopia called Organized Retail in future at your works. Get in touch with me, the specialists who is paid to plan and implement similar customized solutions across the value chains to supply chain start-ups and organised retailers. Visit www.agrisolutions.in or drop me a line at anil.chopra@agrisolutions.in

Presented below is an implementable framework for reversing the ‘Poverty Circle’  by empowering poor farmers with knowledge based marketing & decision enabling systems. This presentation was recently made to a large South Indian ‘not for profit’ organization. A large project based on this framework is in pipeline.