Institute of Product Leadership

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

University of Mysore

Product Management  -  Tesco  -  Blogger  -  Mentor

Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

Tesco Bengaluru

Senior Product Manager , Order Fulfillment

Products Managed - Tills (Point of sale application), self checkouts, Hand held devices (HHD), Tax invoice application, Data Integrity Application &  Test automation product
Customer -(3000+ Tesco Stores) -  Any customer visiting Tesco International stores (Thailand, Malaysia, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland). Store Staff using our products
As a Product Manager I am responsible for Identifying new problems, opportunities , get new requirements from the Tesco Business team . Maintain a prioritized backlog, conduct customer in sighting sessions to understand the requirements, validate hypothesis. 
Perform product discovery sessions and elaborate the requirements into stories , work with the development teams to build solutions that are feasible, viable, and useable. 
Once the solutions are built and tested plan the Go to Market (in this case to production stores) in a scaleable manner mitigating risks and impact to sales.

Challenges in the current role - Managing multiple products, working with other integrated products and influencing their backlogs when ever needed, working with multiple Business stakeholders and conflicting priorities and lastly working with a team located across different geographies. Requirements / problems are for stores across 6 Tesco estates, Stakeholders are across 7 estates, development is based out of Israel, testing teams are in Bangalore, Bangkok and Prague, deployments are done remotely.

Key achievements - Product going live in Hungary and Poland with huge set of complex requirements managed and delivered on time
Delivering in sprints - features that are either saving costs to Tesco, Fiscal requirements,  or increasing  customer satisfaction
Built a framework for automating testing (over 7000 test cases) with a team of 4 Engineers using open source tools such as QALIBER, X-Studio and .net for developing the emulators. . Built a CICD pipeline for testing and giving faster feedback on the code quality.

Product Manager, Customer Experience

As a Project Manager responsible for pilot and rollout of New Products for Store Operations and Ordering replacing legacy applications in Thailand
Activities included - Estimating and  Building Project plans for managing the development of local interfaces, Working with Leadership for the strategy of cutover, Building an overall plan for Cross functional testing across 3 cycles including UAT testing by Local Business teams, planning the pilot and rollout
Achievements
1. Successfully piloted SLV54 into one Express and one Extra store within a short span of 2 months using Risk Based testing .
2. Prepared the Test strategy for E2E SIT, UAT involving multiple systems (comprising of Oracle Retex, Biztalk integration, Group ordering system, Retalix Storeline and space range & display systems, legacy RAMS application, ORWMS systems)
3. Conducting  A UAT of such magnitude was carried out for the 1st time in Thailand
4. The project commenced in July 2011 and the 1st pilot store was done on July 2012 inspite of the flood crisis and other performance related issues
Lessons learnt
1. Thinking laterally to overcome the limitations one system can cause to the program and work out alternate solutions for minimising overall cost to the program. Owing to the flood crisis and potential delay it could have caused a decision was taken to focus on store operations and pilot store functionality 1st and look at supply chain solutions after piloting the store operations. This was cost beneficial to the organisation
2. Resistance to change and convincing people to adapt to the new systems / technology
3. Overcoming language barriers and keeping the communication as simple as possible to understand.

Tesco Lotus

Project Manager - Storeline and Group Ordering rollout

Cross functional Business Analyst - focussing on Order to Cash cycle, Sales to Cash reconciliation, Sales to Order process and Product / Range data flow
Key Achievements
1. Transition the role from Infosys to Tesco Bangaluru
2. Offshore Cross BA for Fresh & Easy (Tesco US) working with development teams on Cross functional requirements. Wrote BRDs which were used for development
3. Worked with International Operations Design team in mapping the Business process flow for various cross functional requirements and build the Group Configuration documents, Cross functional BRDs which were used by development teams
4. Writing data transfer documents (across multiple systems) and working with the Integration teams to build the interfaces (using MS Biztalk)
5. Provide use cases and Test Scenarios for Cross functional testing. Provide SME to testing teams across multiple systems
6. Only SPOC from Bangalore during Commerical and Range cutover in Thailand and Central Europe - worked as a SME for country teams to reach out to, triaged cross functional defects , worked with development teams in fixing the defects, co-ordinated with testing teams for testing and finally managed the release to countries

Business Analyst - Cross Functional

Project - Assortment & Replenishment Planner
Role - Business Analyst
Achievements:-
1. Gathered requirements for the ordering functionality for the product Assortment & Replenishment Planner by visiting the client (Movex) at Sweden
2. Prepared the Business requirement documents for the Ordering functionality 
3. Worked closely with the Project Manager in Sweden & the solution architect to finalise the design of the ordering module

Project -Movex ERP Testing
Role - Business Analyst
Achievements
1. Tested the entire Movex Planning Module for its new User Interfaces & certified the same
2. Worked closely with the developers to get issues identified during testing fixed then and there
3. Mentored junior developers

Symphony Services

Consultant

Experience includes product development, field visits to identify gaps in process and product, offshore product development support, presales support (and product demonstrations to various potential clients), development of new modules, product testing and stabilisation

Project : -Ramco Industries Limited 
Role - Business Analyst
Achievements
1. Studied the Business processes at the factory and prepared Solution definition document detailing the process modelling.
2.Prepared Requirement specifications document  for the customizations needed
3. Prepared the Gap document between the Business Process and the product Ramco virtual works

Project - Carborandum Universal Limited (India)        
Role - Offshore support / Business Analyst
Achievements
1. Developed the reporting of Production at Stages (Stage Level Reporting)
2. Helped onsite team in the designing of the business process in the ERP product

Product Development / Product Stabilisation
Role - Business Analyst
Achievements
1. Responsible for the integration of Production Module with other modules such as Finance, Purchase, Inventory, Sales & Shipping. The job included impact analysis and improvement on various Production components MRP,MPS, Production Order management
2.Developed a new component for Planning – Distribution Requirement Planning (DRP) to handle demands across various sites 
3.Stabilized the Material Planning Component (MRP) and enhanced the same to handle demands across warehouse other than the standard warehouses
4. Enhance the handling of Scrap Products and Recycled products in the Bill of material
5.Tested the usage of a sequence tester tool and approved the same for automatic testing of basic sequences
Presales support
1. Handled Product Demos to various prospective customers such as Preferred Meal Solutions (Currently a Customer), ITC, Boyd Coffee, Domaco, Euthinia Paper Boards etc.
2. Provided training to the Pre-Sales team on the Process Production Solution Product.

Ramco Systems

Senior Product Executive

As a production planner was responsible for planning of the production for the three sites of the company. The job included obtaining the monthly global demands, global forecasts from the SSL(TTK) Group at UK, and  Indian market demands, consolidating the same and arriving at a Production Plan after taking into considerations the various constrains such as Machine Maintenance, Material Availability, Holidays etc. The job also involved handling of the Bill of Materials of the existing products, monitoring any changes in them and preparing Bill of Materials for new products.

- Value Additions: - 
1.	Reworked on the plant capacities of all the three sites and arrived at a new capacity for the same.
2.	For the planning purpose prepared an excel sheet which when given the month requirement can automatically calculate the stock status and requirements
- Executive Production
Was responsible for the planning of production at the shop floor. Monitoring the daily issues at shop floor and resolving the same. As an integral member of the team working towards the achievement of excellence award in Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) conducted a Process Capability study on the Dipping process and followed it up with a Design of Experiment with an aim to reduce quality defects and optimize the process parameters. Responsible for follow up with the Engineering Department over periodic maintenance and upkeep of machinery. 

Value Additions: -
1.	Re-designed the process parameters at the dipping process through Design Of Experiments
2.	Was responsible for the reduction in a defect named weak spot from 0.1 % to 0.01%
3.	Improved the Efficiencies of the machine by 1 % by reducing the downtimes during product type change over
4.	Was able to provide number of Kaizens (Improvements) on the machines, which were readily accepted and implemented
5.	Prepared a training manual on the machinery & its parts and conducted on the job training to the operators.

TTK-LIG Ltd

Production Planner

ITC Printing and Packaging Division
Was taken through a complete induction module of the ITC group giving me idea of the various businesses of the group. 
Involved in a project, which aimed at identifying and eliminating the cutting defects in printed-paper boards

Balaji Rajagopalan

Balaji Rajagopalan