Best Ideas Originate From Those Closest To The Challenge

Trichy lies in the centre of Tamil Nadu, so why do we have our warehouse in Chennai, which is the northernmost tip of the state?”
That was the question posed by a young delivery boy in one of the weekly business review meetings of our client.

Our client, a fast-growing rural e-commerce company with operations in tens of thousands of villages across the country, engaged us when they found their decision-making and growth slowing down as they tried to scale rapidly. While ownership levels and growth were high in the early days of the company, things started to stall as they grew to 300+ employees. Functional siloes crept in. Collaboration reduced. Leaders were dragged into solving tactical issues daily.

As part of the engagement, we introduced various practices such as creating cross-functional teams around customers, defining, and implementing a rhythm of governance, identifying Key Performance Measures, simplifying business reports, practicing unfiltered transparency, teaching them the numbers, reducing power distances between and within functions and many more.

A pilot cross-functional team was created for the region of Tamil Nadu comprising of members from all the functions and levels. This team was trained on the basics of self-management and equipped with business reports they understood. The CEO outlined three key performance measures for the team, one of which was Order to Cash cycle time. Not surprisingly, teams on the field were not aware of these measures and their importance to the business until then.

In one of the weekly business review meetings among the cross-functional team, a delivery boy came up with the idea of shifting the Tamil Nadu warehouse from Chennai to Trichy given its geographical location in the state to reduce the average delivery time and thereby improving the order to cash cycle time. The empowered team saw the merit in the idea and quickly implemented the same. The impact on the O2C cycle time was immediate.

This is just one of the many ideas the team came up with and implemented leading to commendable progress towards the key performance measures. All this without the intervention of leadership!!