First Workshop of Joint CIIE-ICCO Project for Producer Companies
The vast majority of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) continue to struggle to establish viable and sustainable business models and achieve significant revenues and returns to their members primarily due to lack of business planning, poor management and faulty organisational structure and processes. Keeping this in view, CIIE has partnered with ICCO Cooperation in this project to use the creditworthiness assessment to identify the ways and means of supporting producer companies in becoming creditworthy in the long run. Team members from the Social Impact team here at CIIE that are involved in this project at Salim Vali, Akshata Kari and Nibedita Deb. However, as is common with most CIIE projects, the entire team is available for support and intellectual inputs as and when needed.
The first part of this project would require understanding the existing organisational capabilities and approach and guiding the organisation so as to provide sound strategic direction. This would in turn help the producer companies formulate the right business strategy and translate it into a business plan which could be used by them for fund-raising. A collaborative business planning process would be followed in order to ensure complete a buy-in from the professional management and the board of producer companies. The next phase would require the producer company’s project team and CIIE to analyse the highest priority improvement opportunities and identify the best possible solutions for achieving the desired outcomes.
Workshop 1 of the CIIE-ICCO project was held from 31st July, 2014 to 2nd August, 2014. The theme for this workshop was ‘Business Orientation and Business Modelling for Producer Companies.’ Distinguished experts Mr. Muralidharan Thykat (Catalyst Management Services, Bangalore) and Mr. S Balakrishnan (Vrutti, a part of CMS group) along with Prof. Sukhpal Singh and Prof. Vaibhav Bhamoriya (eminent professors from IIM Ahmedabad) were speakers and mentors in this workshop.
