New venture

During my second year in 1999, while pursuing my business administration degree course, my interest in learning new dimensions of doing with business, came with the recent introduction of E-commerce in the country. The focus was mainly to learn entrepreneurship from its roots by incorporating a company to various aspects of disversified product portfolio in international trade.It gave a very broad outline learning of various aspect and dimensions that different products and their trade needs to be looked upon. Due to limited time during college, the main emphasis was mainly of learning rather than building a top or bottom line.Some of the activities that commercially manifested were that of export of some Handicrafts, textiles, Super High premium teas to US, Europe, Japan while import of ferrous and non-ferrous scraps, HR coils, pulses, textiles - finished and raw material from diverse regions etc. (whole list I donot remember)It also gave an insight of various costing parameters, logistics options, studying the nature of opportunities in different countries, challenges and remedies, strategic remedies, diversified forward and backward integration of various industries during my interaction with the international community.

It was an experience that gave aninsight of looking at steel from a global perspective, though the commercial activities were confined mainly with in northern region of the country. The learning included various commercial and technical aspects of steel making, sourcing and branding. Simaltaneosly, having the opportunity to study cost parameters from different dimensions, various innovative ways of doing things, new technological ways in metal processing, etc.Learning, industries associated with forward, backward integration in the value chain and outside, with various value addition techniques and challenges was also useful.

Initially, the experience was that of learning various aspects in textile-spinning process and costing parameters.The whole experience was that of making a turnaround, of almost sick unit into a self sustaining asset expansion base. This was done through various innovative ways right from expelling the rotten fishes in pond, to increasing the production efficiency by removing the bottle necks in the production line through balancing including the slight changes in the layout, introduction of premium markets, switching to alternate ways of low cost raw-materials, cost management, technological changes in machinery for matching quality parameters to international standards to fetch premium and cost control, and widening the market segments for distributing the risk, etc.It was a gradual process that gave an insight to operate in the most challenging times and excel with outstanding performance. It was also a phase of learning of various forward, backward and associated industries of similar nature.