Micro-innovations @ Panther Nails
Innovators, and creators, have always sought opportunities and created something that is useful for the situation then. The disruption took place in every possible form, modernizing the traditional way.
Opportunities were there when 200 years back we were far away from telephonic communications; opportunities were there, when 20 years before we used a dial-up connection to get access to the internet, It has only changed its form over time. Likewise, opportunities are still with us when we are running with the 5G speed and always-on internet connectivity in the Tech-age and revolutionizing everything around us with technology. The situations are always in our favor, we just need an eye to look at them.
#innovation holds for anything that wasn’t in existence before and is serving you to make your life better. The world already had many forms of music players, Sony Walkman was a pioneer among them. Nokia was running at the forefront in the cell phone competition. Dot Net Boom has provided access to the internet to all levels of society. Steve jobs thought of combining a music player, an internet browsing device, and a cell phone in his first-ever iPhone. iPhone was the big innovation that changed the trend in the smartphone industry.
Comparing this big innovation with some small tech innovations that we have seen over the years.“Swipe to unlock” or “Like button” are the small innovations that we have witnessed with their application in their respective areas. No matter how small, you can still feel their presence in your day-to-day life. Moreover, these micro-innovations has crossed their application boundaries, allowing other to adapt and go 1 to n. Swipe is now being used in various other ways such as payment confirmation, showing interest in someone’s profile, archiving or deleting your emails, etc. The classic thumbs-up icon a.k.a. Like button has evolved to have emotions such as love, laughter, sadness, and anger. It has also changed its forms as heart, upvote, praise, etc.
Lets me share some of the #microinnovations we have created that had helped our clients at times.
Email-based approval & query response system.
In an organizational environment, the higher management is less likely to log in to some portal and approve a certain request or workflow, in the same scenario imagine you have multiple application portals to log in to.
We have designed an email-based approval system, where the application sends an automated email to the approval authority with optimum details about the task or workflow. The authorized person can review the defined values and documents attached with the request and will need to simply reply to that email as Approved or Rejected with some remark if required.
The system also validates the email’s contents whether it has come from the legit persona or has been changed by intruders, whether a reply came from a forwarded account, or whether it has been sent from the same mailbox where the request was sent, and so on. The system even checks the whole content of an email for its authenticity and once through, the system approves or rejects that task or the workflow based on the email reply received.
Over period of time, we have also evolved this to appear as an email query response system. The vendors, clients, and other third parties who are registered in our system can send their queries in form of email, the system will smartly recognize the sender, lookup for the data, and respond without any manual intervention in between. This reduced the burden on the accounts executives and procurement personnel who often gets requests from vendors and clients for Account Ledger and Receipts.
External API Integration.
Integration of an external API usually seems to be an easy job, updating your system records based on the responses received from the API. But it is not true always.
When we were integrating a payment platform with our system. The idea was to disburse the payments to the end consumers who are using our platform. In the general workflow, the customer request for redemption in the system, and the system then forwards the requests to the payment processor, The payment processor responds with transaction status, and the system updates the status. Observing the workflow closely we found that some of the failed responses from the external payment processor were because of the network, high load, or similar issues which might have been resolved if we reattempt the disbursement.
Taking this burden of reattempting off the customer and avoiding unnecessary failure intimations to the end customer, we devised a mechanism where the system categorized the responses as Success, Failed, and Retry. In the case of responses received from the Retry category, the system tries the request after a predefined time interval until we get a response as either Success or Failure.
This has turned up the frown and made our customer and their end consumers happy with the overall payment processing system. Where they are notified with only the final update of the payment process.
Auto shortage request generation of Retail Store
While serving the Retail Distribution Sector of FMCG, we observed that there are small retail shopkeepers, so small that they don’t have POS machines. We have provided them with a mobile app via which they can place orders for the distributor. But these retailers used to send the request after 9:00 PM or by early morning 7:00 AM means after closing hours or before opening the shop. Upon investigating more, we got to know that, in the small shops that have an inventory of nearly 200 items, the shopkeeper had to manually validate all their inventory and place orders after browsing through 5000 odd items provided by the distributor.
We addressed this issue with another micro-innovation. The retailer is now shown only the frequent items that he orders most based on his past requests. For further products, he can expand the search and place order for those items as well.
This reduced the overall 1-hour job of the retailer to 10 minutes and provided loyalty to the distributor through the platform. Because no other distributor was having such service to ease out his work.
Visitors Analysis
There are many Visitors management systems available, but I like it when I am able to prove that we are different.
Suppose in the manufacturing industry, a visitor is intended to visit the finance head, but because of unforeseen issues, the finance head was not available today in the plant premise. In such a scenario, the visitor discusses the points with the subordinates and closes the topic. The finance head will be notified of the visit, who attended the visitor, and what was the outcome of the meeting.
Consider another example, where the visitor is willing to meet someone from the SCM department. Such visits are obviously for either of 2 reasons, there is some issue with the material delivered or he has come for requesting new business. If he is visiting for some issues, that has to be considered and reported.
In either scenario, the system collates the data, their frequency, the time they have stayed on the plant premise, etc. and all such reports are emailed to the respective department head automatically early in the morning when the department head can take a sip and review the report and be ready even before he reaches to the office.
