Fulfilling Dreams - Pooja R Agarwal, IIM Visakhapatnam

Overcoming challenges

My father is a businessman who deals in CBSE books. During the start of a new academic year, there is a massive rush of customers wanting to buy school books and other stationery for their wards. Our shop serves about 300-350 customers daily during that period. During March 2017, to avoid the chaos among the customers, I decided to have an automated system in place that would ease the process of serving the customers and also increase efficiency. But on the “D-day” even though the system was in place, the chaos didn’t decrease. It was then when I realized that technology alone isn’t capable of handling the situation. I had to manage the crowd, which was my challenge. I asked the people to follow a system wherein their names were noted in order and an approximate time was allotted to them, this management helped the complete process and also increased customer satisfaction leading to increased sales in March 2018. The situation taught me that no matter how good technology is but with inefficient management, it’s of no good. Hence, knowledge about all aspects of business and a broader perspective is the need for any business.