Work in Progress
We have just concluded week 3 of this SAP Social Sabbatical in Jaipur, India. While we had to cope with the temporary loss of a team mate due to “the Indian Illness”, we followed our new scope of work, conducted and consolidated our research and gained new insights in the programs offered by our client.
StartupOasis launched a new program last year, TEDSTART, to support students and young entrepreneurs with their business ideas in the state of Rajasthan. They did a fantastic job in outreaching to the rural areas of this northern Indian state and are now preparing to strengthen the foundation of their program. The ultimate goal: Scalability.
Scalability is a word that we’ve been hearing all the time. In our context, it means to move from a small to a larger outreach, to solidify existing processes and structures to make them applicable to future incubation centers in India. But how do you actually do this? How can we bring our client on the path to scalability? What makes a business model scalable?
But let me take you back to week 1, when we redefined our scope.
We said we would evaluate open-source CRM systems for our clients, look at the available training material online or within SAP, outline the basic concepts of CRM Best Practices, and do some test runs with freeware. The main reason for this being that the customer data gathered during the various programs is stored and distributed via various channels, i.e. e-mail, spreadsheets, googledrive, and various software solutions.
We spent several days with our research. Luckily, one of my team mates insisted on also following a second approach — which was to take a general look at our client’s current processes to identify gaps. This became the basis for a very important step on our way: understanding the processes and mapping them to CRM processes.
It soon became evident that a fully fledged CRM system is way to complex for a startup of this size. Especially because they are a non-profit and do not sell a product in the traditional sense. This meant we had to re-scope yet again and identify those CRM processes that are applicable to StartupOasis.
Using a CRM software might be “the man on the moon” for our client (quote by my team mate Deniz). But given the short time frame of our assignment, we also want to make sure to give them something for a more immediate use, without setting up a software solution.
To be continued…
