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Hi, I'm Tanvi Chheda, and I'm doing a PhD in geology.
In summer 2019, I interned with
Professional Marketing Services Group Africa, in Nairobi, Kenya.
I was with them for about two months.
Professional Marketing Services Group has been around for more than 20 years.
They were mostly into marketing,
but now they're also into merchandising in supermarkets.
So, things like stocking of products anywhere from milk to satellite
decoders in various supermarket chains in Kenya and Rwanda.
I am a geologist, so I study rocks and
the Earth, but on the side I do computing stuff.
So, almost every summer I do internships related to programming.
I have interned for large corporations,
typically more than 20,000 people, with more systems set up already.
And I was considering this summer doing something a little bit different,
where a role would involve something less defined, perhaps.
Something where systems aren't set up as well.
Little bit like a startup experience.
And I did have some US offers, but I think the location was really enticing.
And I wanted to experience not just visiting another country, but
really just living there, working there, seeing what daily life is like,
and what professional life is like in another culture.
The company has about 400 ground staff who work in the supermarket.
The way they had been keeping track of inventory and
stocking was through WhatsApp messages.
So, they would message their managers saying, hey, did we just run out of milk?
Or a large piece of our inventory is now expiring?
So this is a huge risk, we need lesser demand or lesser supply.
There was no way of keeping track of any of this.
When PMS Group made a report to the milk company,
they would have to find pictures and data by reading through messages.
So, I made an app to log all of this every day.
And then, it's just easy to generate a monthly Excel report about
your everyday sale, your attendance.
The employees can apply for leave inside the app.
Before, what they had to do is come into the PMS office in Nairobi.
So they would have to basically take half a day out to travel there,
fill out a form for approval from the manager to take a leave.
And now, that happens in the app, and
the number of days that they did not go to work is also tracked.
In a large corporation, even when the same period of time in a period of two months,
if you make a change, it's going to be a very, very small part of the system.
And it won't change the operations of the organization as
a whole that much, while here, the impact is visible.
So, that feels like knowing the results of what you've done.
Sometimes you never find out the results, what you did, was it value-adding or not?
Because you leave after an internship.
While here you see the impact.
The skill set I learned from this experience are something that can be
applied to practically any industry.
So, app development but also product management.
And I was always intrigued about it.
I thought I wanted to do it, but
actually doing it tells you what it feels like on a day-to-day basis.
After doing it, I realized that, yes, I do love it.
And if I ever have to commit to it for a full time job for
a number of years, I'm glad I did this to know what the role feels like.
One of the hikes we went to was called Mount Suswa of Victory.
It's managed by the Maasais, and we did a 14 kilometer hike.
Which was pretty nice, fun and saw this crater created by a volcano.
It was so perfectly round, and you could walk on its rim and see the entire rim.
And then we went into caves that were formed from its lava tubes and
saw a species of bat that was endemic only to that place.
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To be able to write something from scratch and create it completely yourself is
really fun, because then you can make it exactly the way you want it.
Considering, of course, how everyone else wants it to be, but
you make it in a way that you think is the best for the organisation,
as opposed to just making tiny changes on something that's already legacy and
you don't want to change the whole system now.
So that freshness and being able to create something from scratch was just so joyful.
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