Why Legacy Businesses Must Innovate to Survive | Ep. 105 [Tariq Miflal]

Now, you've also integrated systems like IoT and advanced ERP platforms.

How has data transformed your operational decision making?

So I think my previous example beautifully ties up with this question of yours, because in order for us to take better decisions, Most of the time, we don't deal directly with the Uber Eats riders or even the Pizza Hut riders for that instance.

So we realized, how do we start getting the right, asking the right questions so that we get the right answers? Because if we just got frustrated.

feedback for the sake of feedback it was again someone else's assumption tying back to our dealer distributor relationship because they told us what they thought was right but then we realized that we need to structure better questions better data points to understand i think an example was let's say a bike that needed to be serviced like if we had a data log of When it was last serviced, we've given basically guidance to our team.

Okay, if this bike with such and such serial number returns, it's coming after certain number of kilometers covered.

It is due for XYZ related either consumables or repairs or areas to be concerned about.

Be it the braking system, be it the...

Tire wear.

So we've always tried to set up a proper methodology to get the right answers, I would say.

So I think IoT and the ERP system enabled us to simplify this because once you start getting a lot of manual data, it becomes another big issue as well.

Yeah.

So how are you, you're tracking all of the data from your different bikes and then you're using that to make decisions as far as production decisions and incorporating costs and that kind of thing as well.

Yeah.

So, uh, I think, so we've annually, we've sold over hundreds of thousands of bicycles just for the domestic market.

And we used to give this warranty card with every bicycle for the end user to fill it and post it to us with their details in order for them to get the, uh, relevant warranty so some products we give lifetime warranty some we do 10 years 15 years so we have extremely long warranty programs so they used to post uh so you could only imagine that you know every month when you get tens of thousands of posts with people's details you need additional people just to sit and enter this data into the system so for over 10 years now i think my brother implemented a means of tracking basically you know when this bicycle which assembly line manufactured it which lorry delivered it And basically who the salesman, the dealer and all of it.

So the idea was to link this, you know, end to end part.

So right now we know where it was purchased from.

And now the goal for us is who is riding it so that we could, again, it's, it's also a requirement when we export to USA and Europe because they need, if ever there was an issue, they want to go through the like CCTV evidence, basically traceability.

Right.

So those gave us some foundations to further making sure these data points are accurate.

Now manufacturing often struggles with automation.

Where do you see the balance between human craftsmanship and your robotics in your operations?

visited a multitude of factories i think i generally take china as an example because every two three years i visit i see significant changes done within the same factory just because a lot of people have this assumption that chinese is cheap labor but i i think that's extremely wrong because they're paid significantly high and very but they're extremely efficient if i'm to uh And they're very, very hardworking.

Most of the employees, especially in these Chinese factories, they don't live near the factory.