UB Tech Update - December 2022

#UbTechUpdate for December 2022

Hi all, it’s Adi Sk here again with the tech update from Uzhavarbumi for December 2022. At least this time, I did not postpone writing till the end of the month 😅. We have a few announcements in this one, read on.

Check out a short video of how 2022 was for us.

You can catch the last edition here.

Admin Portal

• We have big plans to get our hands on different products very soon, but we needed a way to test them in particular areas with a minimum number of customers. So we needed a way to control what products are visible for which customers, based on their area. Now can do trials in selected areas where our delivery network is very strong and get immediate feedback from the entire supply chain. This changes the way how we approach the introduction of new products on our platform.
• Expanding on our master reports, this month I added more graphs and stats to our Delivery Summary. This gives insight into how efficient our deliveries are and stats related to this part of our operations.

Dealer App

• We’ve added a way to manage Delivery persons for each delivery hub by the respective delivery managers.
• A small ‘quality of life’ improvement was the addition of a report that Summarizes various transactions that happened in a given time period. So our dealers & delivery managers can see the cash flow for their dealerships.

Announcements

• A brand new App for our Delivery person, this has been in development for a while but it took great shape, so we decided to launch it. This is currently a web app, where our Delivery agents can log in to see the list of milk deliveries for the day, and also update the status of each delivery once it’s complete. Tracking the last mile delivery was once a painful process but now it’s become easier, I should thank the effort from our delivery head Manoharan and delivery managers for successfully implementing it on the ground.
• This month we launched another brand new App, yes another one. This one is for our Milk Collection Centers to easily manage milk collection from our Farmer network. Prior to this, recording and curating this data involved a lot of paperwork and manual intervention. So we developed a software solution for this need and trained our Collection center staff to accurately update the data, and it’s made an immense difference in terms of operations. We will share more updates on this very soon.

Hardware Trials

• It’s a core principle of Uzhavarbumi to own the software we use and the data it generates. So we develop our own software solutions based on our ever-growing needs. Until and unless a better solution exists or the benifits of building in-house outweigh the time & cost, we choose not to go with a third party. In line with this principle, we decided to make our own custom hardware too for our needs, and the immediate need was from our Collection Centers. Here we have a milk analyzer and a weighing machine but the data needs to be recorded manually by staff. This is a cumbersome process, there are existing solutions for this exact same purpose but it was way beyond our budget for our Centers so, I decided to tackle this problem head-on. I started doing trials using a Raspberry pi (which we bought for a different need) and the trials look very promising. I will share more on this in the next post.

That’s all for this edition of UB Tech Updates, it was a very busy month for me. A lot of exciting new projects and the days just flew past me. Talk to you soon with another update.

Thanks for reading.
by Adi Sk, CTO of Uzhavarbumi