The air was dry and the sun was racing upward. Chips of chicken could be heard through the greetings between farmers stepping off the bus. Stretching my legs felt great after the long drive to Chingola. Forgetting my sunglasses, I squinted through the crowd looking for familiar faces. I stretched out my hand to greet the poultry consultant we hired for the workshop we were providing that day for free, thanks to a local NGO grant provided for agricultural training. “Ahh…the turnout is not so good.” He told me. “What happened?”, “[The mobile provider] failed to send out the text messages to the farmers. Many did not know of this event.”

The host farmer welcoming other poultry farmers to the workshop on poultry management.

It was sad really. The farmers who arrived were learning the intricacies of poultry farming. How to maintain your flock, diagnose problems, and properly manage production. Some of these farmers were very young, fresh out of school, taking the first steps to generating their own income. Many others could have benefited as much as them, for free, if they’d only knew where to go.

I returned to the office the next day. Everyone was busy at their desks getting an understanding of the day-to-day business. “What are your sales for today?” asked one staff member over the phone, “How much feed do you have left?” asked another. All of this talk took time and all of that time cost the company a lot of money. The monthly bill for one of their phone lines was 3 times my monthly rent.

The main office phone and link between shops and the depot

The Problems

The main communications infrastructure of this business needed to be improved. They, unfruitfully, relied on others to inform customers of any new developments. They also relied on lengthy voice communications to get day-to-day numbers that they use to understand the current state of the business.

Cost
Talking costs money. They were paying a fortune for the amount of time that was being spent on the phone.

Time

The time consumed multiplied fast. It took time from head office, it took time from the shop managers, it took their time away from helping farmers, who now had to wait longer to be served.

Response Time

Some days would require rapid changes in strategy. Day-old-chicks are sold every Friday and they are predetermined to hatch 21 days earlier. The business has to ensure that all the baby chickens have a home, and all customers who prepaid will receive what they paid for. Shop managers in different areas need to rapidly coordinate their sales to ensure that the business as a whole will meet (and not exceed) that number. Calling shops one-by-one made it difficult to coordinate those sales from the main depot since it could take up to 2 hours to contact all the outlets.

Less Time for Customers

With the majority of time of the main lines used in lengthy internal conversations. This did not leave a lot of time on our lines for staff to call our customer farmers and talk to them about their flock or remind them of upcoming training events.

Point-of-Sale Equipment

None of the shops currently have computers on hand, nor internet. Power is also unreliable. However, all shops have access to cell phones and cellular service. (Many were provided with company phones)

Deploying Change

To reduce cost, increase response time and potentially increase our connection to our poultry farmer customers, we deployed a text message based system to communicate between the main depot and the various shops. One computer acts as the central hub of text message communication. It, currently, allows messaging of various groups of contacts and keeps records of any responses.

Initial benefits

• The messaging rate is about 20sec/message. This allows us to reach 9-10 shops in under 4 minutes.
• Cost to communicate with all shops is significantly reduced.
• All incoming information is stored on a central computer in digital form rather than on lose sheets of paper.
• Incoming information can be easily copied from text messages into spreadsheets already in use.
• Shop managers can respond when they have down time, rather than being interrupted for many minutes at any point during the day.

“Anthony, this is really good. Soooo much easier”, Charles said, sitting beside me staring at his computer screen. “Look Anthony, almost all the shops have already sent in their sales numbers”. Later he was calling those who did not respond to his text messages trying to explain to them that sales needs to be texted in to the new number that we’re using as our “server”. I was excited to see that he was already reinforcing the new process without my involvement.

Stack of record sheets where staff used to record numbers that they were told over the phone

This initial step, though rudimentary, is important. We eliminate the big problems in one cost effective move, and set up a system that staff are already working to grow and reinforce, increasing the chance that this system will be sustained in the future. We were successful despite having no training for shop managers indicating that it is appropriate to the skill level of staff. The system launched with this one simple text message: “To all shops, you will now be sending in your sales to this number. We will no longer be calling for them.”

With this infrastructure in place, and the capabilities the system has, we’ll have the ability to grow towards cellphone based digital forms that shop managers can fill out and submit into the depot, have automated responses for farmers requesting the latest prices by text, inform our customers of upcoming poultry management training events we’re hosting and the list goes on.

Simply switching from voice to text opens the doors to many of these possibilities.

Implementing a system to improve communication and awareness of the state of the business… just one more item off the list of key deliverables.