Inspiration: The inspiration was generated by enthusiasm and possibility to create that first supply chain management application to enable the supply of renewable and improved cooking stoves to rural areas based on social enterprise model of engaging existing established business, transportation and channels of supply from regional cities to rural villages. This inspiration was further enabled by the opportunity Harkathon provided for the team and for the first time our dreams and passion were aroused, the engagement with mentors and coaches fueled the dream to reality with enthusiasm, insight full words, analytical thoughts and persuasion to achieve what we believed will be the next supply chain unlike the Amazon but from Africa and for Africa to solve the problem of lack of market penetration to the rural areas.
What it does: The renewable supply chain application will enlist the women into marketing teams from their locality. list them into a database while the project team field marketing manager will monitor, train them and keep data and information regarding sales and inventory of products they will be supplied to sell. The app will have to version the USSD application of GSM phones and android for smartphones. The agents will be able to enlist input their information and wait for authentication based on their information and GPS location. Technician mainly youth will be able from the comfort of their phones enlist themselves wait for authentication and acceptance and field agent sent for training and expansion to areas new to the company products. Consumers will be able to purchase solar products at the comfort of their homes through the mobile choose payment model mainly pay as you go or cash through their mobile and delivery done via area technician who will install the products. Women in marketing will enlist wait for authentication and validation once accepted our field marketing manager will visit the group train them and provide a village agent near them for the group to access their products and commence on selling. Door to door marketing will be conducted by the company since social media is not widely used due to the form of the mobile gadgets used and to enable effective brand promotion and awareness on brand products for both solar and cooking stoves. Marketing will be emphasized since the company through its mobile application will focus on the informed consumer as change unit of impact and its increase and changes will be evaluated on time for the renewable supply chain model application, the team decided to develop an application that will enable the team to establish a village, district and regional agents, women marketing teams, identify transporters, youth as technicians. The team will engage in the face to face and door to door marketing campaign with women customer being engaged by women team marketers, identifying youth at the village level, train them and employ them in installing solar products in not less than four village to enable employment. Women teams will be identified through self-help groups or merry go round groups (In Somali they are called Hagbad). they will be trained in marketing and given simple options to purchase and use the company products which will stimulate the market in product purchase. Village agent will be used as the source of product access, display, sourcing at each village location. Village agent business premises will be used as a warehouse to store, create inventory and display company products. The application gives the village agent a tool to store product data and sales information including order and supply. The transporter who is from the same locality
How we built it: We focused on mapping a model that will consolidate the application user interface before agreeing on the design based on user experience and user design based on the type of personas we developed which at first did not agree with what we thought since it took a lot of time to develop the interfaces. Finally, we decided to use an interface though it will take longer to integrate our user will have the final better experience when using it.
Challenges we ran into: Ideation and conceptualization were the most difficult, agreement to disagree and disagree to agree were major challenges among team members which finally bore fruits after agreeing on a model solely based on supply chain model that will focus end customer usage. We are yet to iterate and refine a model that is based on user usage. We are focusing on our UX and UI to improve the application model
Accomplishments that we're proud of: We have mapped out an application focusing to integrate the python programming model
What we learned: We learned about iteration, user engagements since the application and product should be focused on user experience and convenience.
What's next for Renewable product Supply Chain Management app
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