The Context
NABARD
Every one of such cooperative comprises of 750 farmers who pool in Rs. 2000/- each - creating a corpus of Rs. 15 Lakh for the Farmer Producer Company.
This is equally matched with the government pouring in 15 lakh - creating an effective corpus of Rs. 30 Lakh for the cooperative organization.
The Challenge
This 15 lakh grant, & more importantly, the ‘registration’ of the ‘Farmer Producer Company’ - which is vital for the farmers for consequential reasons -
Is subject to the NABARD getting a proper detail of share distribution, complete with the history of allotment of new shares, their division or transfer, cancellation and regeneration along with generation of new certificates - along with a detailed history of transfers and whose shares were broken for which certificate.
( Confused? Well, we were to begin with - so we simplified this to:
- 01Initial data
Shareholder master
Farmer and shareholder portfolio records enter the workflow.
- 02Initial allocation
Allocate shares
Initial share allotments are calculated and recorded.
- 03Transfer processing
Transfer or split
Ownership changes are processed across share certificates.
- 04Certificate lifecycle
Cancel or replace
Previous certificates are nullified when ownership changes.
- 05Validation
Update and validate
Distribution and ownership history are checked and updated.
- 06Certificate output
Generate certificates
Validated, traceable certificates are generated.
)
The Process
The client - a major financial and audit services operator - tried out a few online tools and options available- however non sufficed.
The utility tools available given were targeted to solve general purpose share certification had a the devastating bottle neck of heaving to manually break down and transfer each certificate to ensure accuracy and interlinking of all certificates - and simulating this for the basic scenario of 10 initially allotted shares to be distributed across a co-op of 800 people was a nightmare - Let alone when the number of initial allotments and transfers were all triple or quad digit figures -
And all of that with a running subscription fee!
The Peril
Post trying their hands at several softwares and having deemed them unworthy, the financial wizards came to doing what they do best!
EXCEL!
And this was no ordinary excel mind you - complete with formulas and macros and rules that could confuse the living soul out of us meagre engineers -
Yet, the level of manual processing involved, the attention to detail required to ensure that errors does not creep in and render all macros and formula calculations useless - had them processing a legit of 50 certificates a week with 2 team resources dedicating the bulk of their work time.
Then, came automation _ version 1 -
The tech savvy finance wizard blew up! “There’s gotta be a better way to do this.” determined he -
- Set up a template for the certificate over MS Word
- Implemented mail merge to input certification specifics
- Manually simulated the calculations for the different certificate generations to be performed and configured the data accordingly
This gave them a significant productivity boost - 10x’ing their output to 500 certificates a week from 50.
Just one - technically minor (& not so minor, humanly!!) problem - To err is human!
And in this case, a minor human error at any point in the process or data entry - necessarily would mean a wrong certificate’s generated - and sent out for approval to NABARD & to the owner of the shares the certificate corresponds to - only when received physically by the farmer, would be noticed, and then notified, the entire process reversed, debugged and reperformed!
(The Solution)
In Comes TogetherVSolve -
With our knack of analyzing challenges, structuring them and implementing a crude solution to demonstrate a PoC to begin with - and fine tuning it until the melody begins to ring!
Across multiple spirited discussion sessions with the client, the process, the flow, the challenge and the ultimate intended outcome were understood.
A few brainstorming sessions - and within a week of coding marathons (days, ofcourse, nights more than we’d care to admit! :P) out comes a simple to use, easy to navigate, minimalist yet fully effective business utility - fully customized and tailored to this specific share certification process complete with:
- Bulk intake of the portfolios of the shareholders
- Analyze and clearly alot distinct certifications to initial holders
- Analyze and process the breakage and further transfers of the shares, complete with:
- The nullification of previous share certificates and clean split of the shares of the transferer across all transferees based on time and transfer process driven protocols
- Automated calculations across all domino effect transfers with clear cut, accurate and quality validated splitting of shares
- Generation of new, finalized share distribution master reference with clean, individual certified allocations compliant with all the regulations required by NABARD.
- Shares certified in any official generated certificate uniquely identifiable and fully traceable for all history of transfers, splits and distribution
- Clean, algorithmic erroneous scenario identification, backtracking, root cause marking and and user intimation to side step data entry inaccuracy whilst providing restricted, secure access to the share certification utility data
The Utility now:
- Warns against reallocation of shares to a samenumber, prompting the user to confirm if this indeed is the how the share exchanges took place, or if this is a miscalculation arising out of inaccurate data feed
aadhaar
Highlights inaccuracies in data at all steps -
- Share portfolio master initialization
- Allocation of initially minted shares
- Transfer and share splitting details
And allows weeks of work to now be performed within a total of 6 clicks - per allotment and share transfer cycle.
Press the 7th and voila! - a few thousand certificates are generated, timestamped and downloaded as directly reviewable, sharable and submittable artifacts.
The Impact
Business and Operations
From 50 to 500 a week to thousands of share distributions processed within seconds - all at a nominal, one time building cost - and as always is with TogetherVSolve - looking out for the best long term interests and business utility for the our clients - everything is served with free authentication protected domain over a free server = No running cost, Forever!
The real impact _ optimizing for life and the world!
What this truly meant was thousands of farmer households gaining their “share” of the co-operative, in a timeline wherein the bottleneck in the lengthiest process has atleast been reduced by a week!
[The week that earlier was spent in creating, allocating and simulating the transfer and splitting of shares (for one such org of the 10,000 FPOs as originally targeted by the GoI), with an overall registration to certification timeline of ~30 days now brought down to 22, much of which is in government protocol mandated approval and verification processes that were beyond the scope of this system]
That’s a 25% optimization in the overall process (and a 100x optimization over the initial 10x optimization that the business had achieved for itself for the targeted aspect of the complete process).
For the farmer households, this effectively implies that their hold, their ‘shares’ are error free (consider that much of the rural population does not even understand or spot any errors in their documentation and thus any error goes on unacted upon until as such time as the certificate is required (and will then at the time of need be rejected owing to human/technical/processing errors) and it puts into perspective the true value to life that just ensuring quality in delivery directly adds) - and dependable and valid official documents - This also aids avoiding hassle and to and fro for our simple rural folks in trying to get their legit ‘shares’ certified!
Given, members of the cooperative society are households from all walks of life - farmer families with monthly income of < Rs. 12,000/- are also encapsulated.
For these families, Rs. 2000 contribution to the co-op pool is a significant portion of their already thin stretched resources - and even imagining the inconvenient restlessness the mind would be put through on such an entity until that their stake of the ownership in the co-operative is not certifiably locked down (or worse still, locked down with a compromised certificate of shares - potentially rendering their holding null and void if not caught and rectified cleanly).
The utility has already served a dataset of 35,000 farmers - and with the 10,000 FPO target of the GoI with 750 members each - has the potential of touching upto 75,00,000 households -
That’s atleast a few thousand hassles avoided, a few thousand rights safely awarded - and a few thousand families with ‘ease of mind’.
Afterall, what good is our work in this world, if we can’t make it better for everyone - Together!
About the Author
Vinayak Kuthiala -
Founder TogetherVSolve
Building Human Intelligence Driven - Artificial Intelligence Powered Solutions with an Impact First approach!