Field Immersion Module at IIMN is a 3-week long program that allows PGP students to get first-hand experience of how small and medium scale enterprise functions before getting exposed to real-time industries through summer internship and final placement. These enterprises are from different cities of Maharashtra like- Nagpur, Aurangabad & Nashik and belongs to different sectors like- manufacturing, IT, Agricultural, Chemical, etc. They are either For Profit or Not for Profit Organizations. Students are given a chance beforehand to choose their areas of interest, be it Profit or Not for Profit organizations. This program is quite helpful not only for inexperienced students but also for experienced students.
My partner and I started our FIM with "NICE Imports," which is a partnership firm and a subsidiary of NICE Software Solutions located in IT Park, Nagpur. NICE Imports acts as a third party helping in the smooth import process of different grades of waste paper from suppliers outside India to Paper mills in India. Since it was a new kind of experience, it was quite surreal for me but on the other hand, a new journey was awaiting and hence I was ready to add one more chapter to my book of “My two years of MBA at IIMN.”
Before FIM officially started, my partner and I went to the FIM location and met our FIM Partner to get to know about our problem statements and their expectations from us. IIMN has a unique diversity of students comprising of a significant number of people with good past work experience. Hence the challenge for most of us was to understand how small & medium enterprises work. The only thing I knew was that these three weeks were going to be difficult.
We divided our three-week schedule in such a way that we took the first 2-3 days to understand the business process being followed by the organization. Next two days we took to have one on one interaction with all the employees to understand the bottleneck they are facing in the current process. The second week was completely dedicated to gain hands-on experience by working ourselves on their software platform and getting a thorough understanding of the documentations they deal with daily. Last week was much more invested in working out all possible options for the entire bottleneck we explored through primary and secondary research and preparations of our final presentations. All in all, it was a good learning experience as it allowed me to implement what all I have learned till now in my two terms of MBA.
About the Author: Tithya Sharma is a PGP 2019-21 student at the Indian Institute of Management Nagpur. Prior to joining IIM-Nagpur, she worked as Senior Systems Engineer for Infosys for 3.5 years. She is a cricket and badminton enthusiast and spends her free time writing or cycling.