Do Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch!
It is common occurrence to set aside learnings from the past in search of new learnings.
A classic example of this presented itself when a bunch of young Mu Sigmans found themselves at the brink of moving away from learnings from yesteryears in search of new beginnings.
Did they stick to old learnings?
Did they make new beginnings?
Most importantly, did they succeed in convincing the client?
Read the extract from the team as they unravel the story.
“Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched”
This old Chinese Proverb is a little too fatuous for a bunch of industrious Mu Sigmans, who are in the business of doing the exact opposite (quiet literally!).
The Journey:
We are a bunch of fresh-minded youngsters, who are not afraid of pushing the limits.
Our clients are a company that deals with 6 million chickens every week. Therefore, to them, the supply chain is no chicken business. The sales and operations team has to deal with demand and supply fluctuations on a daily basis, and planners usually take reactive decisions to make ends meet. Mu Sigma works with them to help them plan better using data driven decisions rather than gut based ones.
After understanding the complex business and appreciating the details involved, the Mu Sigma team created a planning tool for them. This tool gives the planner a holistic view of demand and supply, identifies pockets of mismatch and also provides insights to solve them.
Once the planners had a view of their supply chain, they wanted to change their reactive planning ways to proactive ways. Mu Sigma looked into the major cause of the problem – the supply. The team then started to work on streamlining the supply, and turned themselves into data driven astrologers in doing so!
The Success!
The client now has the first prototype of a tool that can regulate the supply by predicting the weight of a flock of birds before the birds are even born – that too with 95% accuracy!
This is a massive leap for the client, who would know their supply one week in advance with 90% – 95% accuracy. The tool is currently being enhanced to be intelligent so as to do most of the planning on behalf of the planners.
Apart from this, Mu Sigma also helped handle financial claims from their customers, helping them save 6 million pounds.
The Recognition:
Within one year of its engagement, Mu Sigma’s ground breaking work and ingenuity has been recognized by the top management, including the CEO himself!
The CEO, fondly known as “Chicken King”, recognized Mu Sigma’s contribution towards smarter decision making in the organization. So much so, the planning tool that was given to the client was internally referred to as the “Google of UK Poultry.”
The CEO, on one occasion, even took the side of Mu Sigmans when faced by resistance from his internal team. The director of sales and operations team is now all praise for the offshore team too. This is evident from the perfect scores that the team has received in all its Mu3Ds without exception.
The engagement will complete its first year in July, and the offshore team has been planning on ways to celebrate and involve the clients in all the merriment. The team is also working on making its first DWOW attempt a successful one. The video is being co-created along with the client, so that the clients are also able to use the video to market themselves. Fusing analytics with poultry seems uncanny to most, but the client takes pride in the collaboration and leverages on it to stay ahead of its competitors.
The Team:
Sripada Vittala, Zameer Abbas, Himanshu Kulkarni, Meghna Jani, Sabhyata Shukla, Rohan Shetty and Vamsi Yerra