Ever since we dreamt of building our company, we had an objective of selling the services of Laboratory Equipment, Furniture and Digital Education in the Educational Institutions. After dealing with the overall segments, we addended the Turnkey Solutions to our domain. Thereafter, in due course of time after a lot of hardships we started receiving orders for setting up the interiors of various institutions. We had planned the “Know-Hows” & “Where-About” of intricate specifications for the same. We initiated with designing & furnishing of Principal’s Room & Staff Rooms of various schools in vicinity. Later we modified our SOPs & started planning for the nearby states accordingly, in order to expand our reach. We started receiving orders from rural areas on a higher frequency. We simplified our process by strengthening our base systems. We grew in terms of revenues as the bucket size & risks involved in this domain was already known to be huge in comparison with the others.

We received huge orders from remotely located places in Jharkhand. There were many difficulties in executing the projects considering the location. Now, after successful accomplishments we won’t call them difficulties, rather would term them as challenges.

We were awarded a contract for furnishing the rooms for the Dignitaries along with the Video Conference Rooms. I am just penning down the challenges encountered & their respective troubleshoot implemented for each & every instances.

First Challenge: Limited Time

Timeline for executing the entire work was 15 days. We took it up as a doable challenge and went ahead. Normally, it’s the mindset of various service providers is to falsely commit time and later compromise with either quality of work or delayed execution. Apart from this, but in every odd circumstance, there are short time visits of various guests, inspections etc for the scrutiny of the place. And then the action plan has to be adjusted to accommodate the same request. Because it is our belief that while executing any project, one needs to empathize with your client and work with it.

It’s the battle against time which you have to fight with yourself so as to challenge and then applaud yourself silently for the feat. In this case, it was our team which could foresee the challenges & think for Action Plans A, B, and so on.

Second Challenge: Site

Each site is different which posses a range of challenges. There are many which you can’t foresee even after extensive planning. But you have to tread through troubleshooting as they come. Some of them are coined below:

• Problem #1: We were asked to execute the Wall Veneer Panelling at Vice Chancellor’s Office, Conference Rooms apart from the individual Office set-ups & Door Pilings in a very short span of 15 odd days.
  Solution: We applied a basic Work-Time concept we learned in school. For a fixed time we bolstered extra manpower backed with thorough Action Plans.
  Leadership: Sunil Panda & Kumar Manish
   
• Problem #2:. The walls of the rooms were not aligned & straight.
  Solution: This added to our problems and figured out an approach of aligning them with extra woodwork & that we could manage in the odd night hours.
  Leadership: Arijit Mukherjee & Abhishek Dubey

• Problem #3: The conference room had a constructed carpet area of 230 Sq Ft. and could only accommodate max up to 20 Personnel. Addendum to this, they also wished to have an Elliptical shaped conference table with space in between for the Indoor plants to be kept. Of course, it adds on to the aesthetics, but with a limited space, it looks like a constraint. Space was to be designed in such a manner so that there could be a passage for maneuvering too.
  Solution: Although space was a constraint, we were successful in convincing the Administration for keeping wall oriented chairs for extra 18 personnel. We were delighted with this very small achievement. Coming to the Indoor plant maneuvering space, we could manage to modify the Conference Table by introducing a rotatable flap in the raceway of the table so that it could be lifted up for getting into the vacant space.
  Leadership: Sunil Panda & Arijit Mukherjee
• Problem #4: The basic problem before executing a design into reality is to know the taste of the client. After a lot of hassles, we were able to convince and sell the design beforehand. The constraint coming up was the readiness of the ply at the time of shortage. Since it was Dumka, we could hardly expect, but out of our utter shock, we could manage to have them at escalating prices (for obvious reasons). Nonetheless, we managed to execute the Wall Panelling & Door Panelling along with the setup of the Conference table with the installation of Video Conferencing Unit.
  Leadership: Kumar Manish
   
• Problem #5: Talking about the Vice Chancellor’s Office, there were some difficult areas to the panel.
  Solution: Our designer was successful in introducing some amazing ideas like the introduction of flower pot area to hide the pillar area, introduction of a cut-out for fitting in Lord Ganesha with the amazing spot lights focusing over, diamond cutting at the top with not so flashy designs at the bottom. Moreover to make them with a veneer finish takes a lot of time in polishing & drying. We could manage multi halogen lamps for the drying part & so as to execute the same in stipulated time. To add on, we introduced some wall frame paintings designed by our team.
  Leadership: Pooja Preeti Singh & Ashish Bharadwaj
• Problem #6: Addition to the furnishing of rooms, we were to install CCTV Cameras & Cassette Acs.
  Solution: We were able to install the CCTV Cameras & Cassette Acs for the entire offices in this time frame.
  Leadership: Satayu Bakshi

Third Challenge: Logistics

Serving at a remote location, a lot of difficulties when there are no basic amenities for the staff to be fed, shelter, work environment. We had a tussle with the scenarios pre-installed over there. We could not bear the Hotel expenses for the entire team up-to 20-30 odd days. We could have done that but the OPEX would have been damaged. Hence we opted for a rented house (2BHK) at a nominal cost & getting a roof above our head for the due course. However, in this scenario, in spite of the daily challenges faced - one thing was enhancing for sure & that was our bonding. We used to have enumerable discussions for our execution plans in MS Project for the parallel activities to have a critical path.

Saying NO to some situations is easy, but after having done this, I could say that some YES’s are not that tough to break you but only evolve yourself. All I can say is that we stood as ONE to solve the problem of MANY.

We hope to serve more vibrantly in the coming days and will keep you posted with other exciting stories. Till then, happy surfing our website www.labkafe.com for various new editions.