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SecC Group02 AkshayaPatra

Supply chain management involves coordinating all activities involved in delivering products and services to customers. This includes planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics. The main challenges faced in supply chain management are maintaining consistent quality and delivery times, dealing with suppliers and transportation issues, and addressing customer complaints efficiently. Organizations address these challenges through strategies like monitoring operations, adding capacity, improving procurement processes, providing employee training, and utilizing new technologies. Continuous evaluation and process improvement is also important for organizations to effectively achieve their goals as market conditions change over time.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
39 views5 pages

SecC Group02 AkshayaPatra

Supply chain management involves coordinating all activities involved in delivering products and services to customers. This includes planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics. The main challenges faced in supply chain management are maintaining consistent quality and delivery times, dealing with suppliers and transportation issues, and addressing customer complaints efficiently. Organizations address these challenges through strategies like monitoring operations, adding capacity, improving procurement processes, providing employee training, and utilizing new technologies. Continuous evaluation and process improvement is also important for organizations to effectively achieve their goals as market conditions change over time.

Uploaded by

Saumya Gautam
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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You are on page 1/ 5

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

1|Page
1. What are the challenges faced by the Akshaya Patra Foundation (TAPF)
in its pursuits of Mission?
Ans. The main challenges faced by the

a. Constant learning and improvement


a. Maintaining Cooking to consumption time
b. Experimentation with recipe selection: Continuous experimentation suiting the
tastes of all by the trial and error
c. Handling complaints from school
i. Time of Delivery
ii. Insufficient quantity of food
iii. Taste of the food
iv. Quality of rice
d. Problem from the supplier: They quality and the supply of the products, they are
dependent and are ongoing relationship with third party suppliers.
e. Complaints from workers: About the working conditions and difficulties faced by
them.
b. Expectations for the further growth: Development of new kitchens needed replicable model
which also allows room for improvement from the current capacity, which continuously go
for improvement meeting the raising demand. Already existing kitchens in the cities are
getting heavy capacity and now the committee should plan if they should go for the
modifications in the existing or open up new kitchen in the same city to meet the demand.
c. Continuous addition of new schools: Along with the expansion there are continuous
involvement and addition of new schools, where they have to go for continuous
improvement and structuring of the delivery process and schedules along with route
extensions
d. Vehicle Routing Problem: With continuous addition of new schools and increase of traffic
conditions and external factors they have to go with the continuous vehicle routing to
deliver on time.
e. Supply Chain
a. Poor quality of rice: Rice is received as a subsidiary from the central government
which is of very poor quality. Also this with sold by the farmers to FCI through the
middle man, where these people try to add various foreign particles in it to increase
its weight, it is observed that 20% of it is unusable.
f. Challenges in Centralised operations
a. Logistics Problem: The foundation faced the logistics problem in efficiently
transporting the food in the available time window to the target destinations
b. Unforeseen challenges: There may be some sudden demand or need of additional
food in some of the schools, there may be vehicle breakdown where there should be
backup vehicle to continue with the distribution, Traffic delay because of the busy
cities.
c. Worker retention: It is one of the major problems in some cities where the workers
get trained her and leave for the other hotels where the wage levels are higher
when compare to the present wages at Akshaya Patra

2|Page
d. Flexible standardised model: Trying to go for the customisation of the food
according to the local region along with the standardised and flexible model
g. Challenges in decentralised operations
a. Human Resource issues: Basic training should be given to the women in cooking,
nutrition and hygiene. They all are uneducated and other training related too
maintain the records, accounting, inventory, requisition slips and teaching then to
count is given to them. localized training of villages is extremely labor intensive
b. Difficulties in transportation: when it rained, they trucks get structed in the mud
and ruts and they are left there itself for up to 3 days.
c. Lack of electricity & refrigeration: This led to the spoilage of vegetables especially
those which are perishable and the storage of them is very challenging.
d. Necessary scale: the question was are they able to achieve the necessary scale in
those areas to make the difference.
e. Trusted supervisors: It is very difficult to get the trusted supervisors, as most of
them fall as a prey for the corruption schemes which are prevalent in the Indian
system.
f. Problem of quality assurance: Even after giving very intensive training to them and
even after strict control there still exists this problem
g. Theft: In the villages because of corruption and even after strict rules still there
exists theft.
h. Dependency on volunteers: The kitchen management was overseen by the religious
volunteers, that means here it is less than 2% of the expenses are from operations,
administration and marketing whereas in other NGOs it is more than 20%, it might be one of
the limitations for the growth.
i. Maintaining Cost efficiencies
a. Increased Transportation costs
b. Dispersed locations of Schools
c. Vendor Relationships
d. Administration

3|Page
2. What are the options that Akshaya Patra is pursuing to address these
challenges?
Akshaya Patra is pursuing the following options to address the challenges:

a) Dealing with daily operational issues:

Akshaya Patra has been facing a number of problems in daily operations related t quality and
quantity of food, menu selection, delivery time etc. The management of Akshaya Patra has tried to
identify the root cause of the problem and act accordingly.

b) Creating decentralized model to cover rural areas:

For expanding to new areas and for extending the meal service to new schools, Akshaya Patra has
adopted a decentralized model consisting of small kitchens instead of a centralized model. The
centralized model was becoming inefficient as the scale of operations was expanded.

c) Capacity addition through new functional kitchens:

As new schools were added, the capacity and number of kitchens also needed to be increased. So,
Akshaya Patra focussed on productive and process-oriented kitchen facilities that were hygienic and
replicable.

d) Monitoring and control of delivery time:

In order to ensure efficient and timely delivery of food to the schools, the time taken by the delivery
truck to move from one school to another was tracked and deviations were taken into account.
Security guard of the delivery truck had a mobile phone to communicate with the central kitchen
during any emergency situation.

e) Keeping a check on adulterated food:

Procurement of basic ingredients like rice was affected due to adulteration. In order to increase the
weight of rice bag, middlemen added foreign materials which comprised around 20% weight of each
bag. Akshaya Patra carried out thorough cleaning of rice to get rid of non-food materials.

f) Maintenance of hygiene:

The villages were Akshaya Patra operated village kitchens had very different hygiene standards from
urban areas. Akshaya Patra communicated the significance of hygiene to the local staff and the
practice of taking bath daily before food preparation and service.

g) Relevant training to women in villages:

Akshaya Patra provided basic training to women in cooking, nutrition and hygiene who were
employed as cooks. There were also provided additional knowledge about accounts, inventory and
requisition slips for handling day to day transactions.

h) Scalability and customization:

Akshaya Patra is looking to build replicable kitchen models with added capacity to support future
growth. Continuous improvement and flexibility of operations are also taken into account to
customize to the local needs.

4|Page
3. What changes are required in its operating model to achieve its
mission?
With an aim to provide nutrition through mid-day meals while leveraging it to get the kids to
schools. With challenges increasing, while they also have to increase the coverage, certain changes
need to be made in its operating model:

a) Procurement changes – Procurement needs to be of better quality so that extra efforts


involved in cleaning and food lost due to this poor quality & wastage is reduced. For
decentralised centres which serve a group of villages, the procurement can be done directly
from the farmers in those villages
b) Partnerships – India is a country where people believe in religion and God and donations to
them. And the foundation itself was started by followers of ISKCON. Partnerships with other
religious institutes like temples etc (which in general have their own food program for the
devotees there) can help in improving the quality of the food while also solving certain
problems associated with donations & funding
c) Usage of IT systems – Usage of IT systems for planning, procurement, storing ,
transportation (of both raw materials and mainly the cooked food to the schools) ,
attendance of students at that time, etc would help in cost reduction at all the levels while
also reducing wastage, theft and other quality problems with proper delivery of food at the
right time
d) Better capacity utilisation – Certain states like Karnataka (Indira canteen), UP
(Annapoorneshwari canteens) etc have state funded subsidized food centres for the lower
classes . To better use the kitchen, which would not be used much after the preparation of
mid-day meals, can help in providing additional income to the organisation, helping in it
expand to other regions
e) Corporate partnership – With their current mission being to serve 5 million kids by 2020,
Akshaya Patra can identify the unserved areas and pitch to the corporates and obtain CSR
funding from them ( which is mandatory for certain companies according to the Companies
Act)
f) Market the work it does for more funding – TAPF is one of those organisations which doesn’t
publicise the work done by it. Publicising it more and more, and collaborating with certain
firms or organisations, can help in increasing the voluntary donations
g) Opening of more centralized kitchens in cities – would help in negotiating the increasing
traffic in certain cities

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