Edoardo Policano ’10Journal #1
It’s a little over a week since I landed in Bogotá, Columbia, and I have to admit, I love this city, even though the start was a little more difficult than expected.
After a two-day odyssey to come here (my plane had an issue, we went back to Paris, and all the passengers, including me, spent the night at a Disneyland Paris resort for families with children), my first impression was influenced by a mix of jet lag, shortness of breath (2600 meters or 8,661 feet above sea level), observed pollution, and a traffic jam.
As soon as the taxi left me in Chapinero, the neighborhood where I will live and work, Mark Pedersen ’07, Co-Founder, COO and Country Manager of Frogtek, introduced me to one of our colleagues, Boris, who is a tendero (shopkeeper), and one of Frogtek’s sales representatives.
Tenderos are the core users of Frogtek technology. The main product of this start-up, that now counts 14 employees in four countries — Colombia, Mexico, the United States, and Spain — is called Tiendatek, and it’s a software that runs on Android (Google mobile operating system) cell phones, and helps shopkeepers in keeping track of their sales, purchases, credits, and debits and gives them useful reports, which are used to improve store performance.
My role is to advance the software a step forward, from giving information to providing recommendations. For this reason, I am now working on product profitability and inventory optimization, mainly through Excel and with the help of Professor Garrett van Ryzin and Dr. Margaret Pierson, PhD ’10.
These days it’s a mix of visits to shopkeepers all over the city, learning how to use Tiendatek, e-mails with our academic advisors, brainstorming with Mark Pedersen ’07 and David del Ser ’08, co-founder and CEO of Frogtek, and of course enjoying what this fantastic city has to offer.
Journal #2
The weeks are passing and I feel more ownership in my work and the innovations generated by that.
First of all, as a former (and future) consultant, part of my day here is spent working on Excel. There are two main shopkeeper needs that I’m trying to answer through Excel analysis:
- Which of the products that they sell are really profitable? What should they do with unprofitable products?
- How should they manage inventory?
Supermarkets have great, sophisticated answers to those questions, but small, corner-store owners don’t have access to that technology, and most of the time they don’t have the required education to understand complex analysis and modeling.
For these reasons, an application on their cell phones that answers those basic questions is important. Regarding the first question, the way I’m building their new interface is through simple logos — thump up, thumb down, $$$, green or red lights — that can help them assess each product they sell. So far, they are appreciating the logos.
The second question is a bit more complicated because one of the main fears of store-owners is losing customers by running out of stock on some items. For this reason, they over-invest cash in buying inventory that for some products is up to 10 times more than required. A simple model stolen from operations class is showing them that they should be 99 percent confident (i.e. all but one week every two years) that a product will not run out of stock if they order the right quantity, calculated through sales averages and standard deviations.
Finally, my social life is not missing out. Andres Carne de Res is one of the coolest spots in the city (it appeared in the New York Times awhile ago), and I have been traveling to Cartagena (which is seaside) and Quito, Ecuador (which has mountains and volcanoes) during the past few weekends.
