winter projects @ WeP

hey public!!

had a hectic week at work from the 7th to 11th March, 2005. Had to conduct my survey for the website project in 2 segments, the employed class and the student community. Employed class was relatively easier to do, with friends in a variety of companies. Contact Rishi, Pandey, Milind Patil, Ankit Jain, Gam, Dicks, Sai, Pras & Bafna and his school chum Gurmeet Kaur for IBM, SAP ICG, Siemens, Intel, Nestle, Infosys, Mico Bosch, Philips & Oracle and ING Vysya Bank respectively!! Quite a sample, i mussay!!

student survey went a little wobbly, and added to my frustration at work!! manish has a cousin here who is in the 1st year of her engg. gave 50 forms to her and asked her to help me filling these out. but for my sample to be spread statistically, i need students from different streams. visited st. joseph's college of arts & science, here on residency road. one thing i must admit is the 'beauty' of college going crowd in bangalore :D:D

spent about 2 hours in the canteen of this college, trying to pursuade the public there to help me get a few forms filled out. managed about 21 forms eventually! what made the work distasteful was the manner in which "I" was being treated by these souls. being an engineer, then a mba, and still being looked down upon like dirt isn't something i was prepared to handle. in retrospect, doing a market survey surely teaches a buddying manager a few things about the tough life his subordinates face out in the field. am sure there's more to come on the learning curve in my career!!

still in search of "contacts" in commerce, medical, dental, pharmacy, law streams. am not sure how i will go about doing this...the cooperation i get (rather do not get) on a cold visit isn't something i would want to experience in colleges pertaining to each of these streams.

but yesterday, sitting with my guide/boss...a marathi speaking goan (like me), a mr. anurag borkar, i realized that i have almost done 70% of the work this survey entails. and the sweetest part was when i felt that i'd done things correctly too!!

a final plan for the project (now in its finishing stages) has been chalked out now. i will be combining my initial benchmarking with other e-commerce websites, the pilot survey with registered users, as well as this survey for non-users to deliver the cliched 4P's of marketing for promoting the website's online printing services...

project no.2 entails NPD (new product development) evaluation. finished working (long time back) on ThinPrint GmbH's offering of a variety of printing technology softwares. Have made my suggestions and recommendations for possible harnessing of some modules in my report. am now onto a solution being provided by a Fortune Informatics Ltd. from hyderabad. they are into providing software for formatting and managing printing for business documents like bills, invoices, etc. these are generated from raw data that companies generate by the tons each month!!

project no.3 entails a hardware comparison of lasers in the market. the final deliverable is a "quick reference guide" for the sales force. the opponents in the field are ofcourse, HP and Epson!!

project no.4, which will take off come april, is about impact assessment or effectiveness study of the ad campaign that WeP Print & Save are currently pursuing. finer details are still to be worked out.

but unfortunately, none of these projects require my being outside b'lore. even the last one, much to my chagrin, is to be done within bangalore city limits, so says my boss!! not that i detest bangalore, but doing marketing projects in the corporate usually involves a lot of touring (which i was really looking forward to!!)

thats about what i've been doing, and will continue to be doing @ WeP for my post placement project period till the last week of May.