How I will build by decentralize energy Last mile access model for rural India — Part 1
By: Sagar B
Tags: Social Entrepreneurship, Last Mile Delivery, Renewable Energy

In the last article “Clean Technology access to Rural India” we saw the current status, landscape of enterprises working in this sector.

This article presents the major challenges faced by enterprises working at last mile and good practices which can be followed under various functional areas. I had studied the Selco India, Simpa Energy, Frontier market, Pay as you go model of Azuri Technologies, Grundfos waterlink, Dlight, Greenlight Planet etc models to understand the various solutions provided by them, issues partaking in last mile delivery and their impacts. This article focuses on the learning from this study.

Common Challenges faced by this last mile delivery models can be summarized as follows:

Finance: Raising the necessary commercial capital for establishing the value chain and expansion of intervention. HR: Identifying and retaining good quality human resources at both the management and field levels. As the mostly such enterprises work in the low resource setting; remote staff monitoring, and management also remain a big issue. Logistic: For last mile delivery players, logistics takes major margin. Setting up an efficient logistic chain remains a big issue. Mobilization & Communication: Initial community mobilization is a big challenge because of the primary reason of lack of finance. Once the customer is acquired, the challenge is in getting the customer adopt technology. Communicating the link between high cost and quality. Service: Volume remains the primary measure elements for most of the manufacturers. In the cost comparison most of the players don’t take care about the quality of products and also don’t provide after sales service. Due to lack of awareness & infrastructure rural communities face this as their biggest challenge.

Good Practices for various functional area:

Research and development:

There should be focus on understanding community needs & introducing products which are most relevant for addressing their issue. Enterprises should Invest fair amount of funds on R & D . We should consider the community & field as a research lab to test multiple technologies & business models. Adopt the desirable changes as demanded by the community.

2. Capital Structure

Diversity in funding & revenue stream is the utmost important thing in such a business. (There should be additional revenue source along-with energy products last mile delivery).

There should be some short engagement project implementation tasks which can add additional income to rural entrepreneurs.

3. Procurement of Technologies:

The primary focus should be on providing last mile delivery and for the purpose we shouldn’t work on product design. We should do strong market research & build partnerships with trustworthy brands who deliver authentic & quality products with satisfactory after sales services. All design should be customer centric and environment friendly. Along with partners we should give an After sales service for each kind of product. We should have a robust service centre infrastructure with the aim to give fastest service to consumers.

4. Inventory management

This is one of the important elements which directly define success of a model. There should be precise policy defined for inventory management & whole consumer data collection. This process should be built with strong technology back end support. There should be a live dashboard of inventory available at various points in the value chain and stock & recovery limits shouldn’t cross the desired level at any moment.

5. Community Outreach

Consumer Feedback Collection: Before launching any single products, the proper field testing should be done. Consumer feedback should be listened to openly & forward into action. Consumer feedback should be collected in transparent ways and their voice should be delicately formed into actions. We should have a robust mechanism to monitor the value addition (price of products, after sales service etc) at customer level.

Customer care (telephonic) service or portal: We should establish active customer care service which can help customers.

6. Marketing

We should adopt various methods to understand market potential and build a customer centric market. There should be various ways of publicity like- Demonstration van, demonstration at farmer fair, village fair during major festivals, service camps, banners, distributing pamphlets, digital messages, virtual reality, publishing articles in media etc.

From the inception stage we should focus on creating a company as a last mile delivery brand in the community. Marketing activities should have the capacity to involve as many as community and build trust.

7. Human resources

We should hire more than 60% of human resources from the local area. So that we can have fair enough understanding of local context and we will not lose any important element.

The last mile delivery network should be paid on incentives basis whereas whole human resource financial gain should be interdependent on other’s performance.

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