Part of starting my MBA is to learn the Business skills that would take me further in my career, I realized that I lacked these skills when on my spare time I began to work on a side project; an online super market. Throughout the project development, I stumbled in learning some necessary concepts that would either make or break the project. Even if the idea could be successful and work out, a wrong implementation would result in a failure.
Now that I am almost done with the first two periods of my MBA, I learned a lot of tools and skill sets my different courses, for example in Entrepreneurship classes, I am learning that in the a project like the online super market, I must know how to find the intersection between the two markets in this case the internet world and the grocery shopping, and what added value can I provide to my customers and would distinguish my business from others, who are my key partners and what is my market size. Extensive market research is needed before I can set my value proposition to my target audience.
Which brings me to the marketing classes where I have been learning how can I segment my market and target the most suitable segment to customize my service to better suit them and acquire market shares through them, in the online super market for example they would probably be young professionals that are comfortable with buying online and have little time to spend in the grocery store, or a busy mother that would rather spend this time with their family.
A whole other dimension needs to be considered when dealing with the operations of such a business, I n the operations class we learned a very interesting model which is applied by Dell computers, and how they are managing their business without having to deal with inventory. Also reflecting on the online super market, ideally that would be the case when dealing with the grocery inventory, however it is not easy, I need to have very good forecasting abilities to apply this model, or else I would be cutting down heavily on my profit margins by applying a just in time approach to my business.
With big companies starting to apply this service such as Amazon Fresh, it will be very interesting to watch and learn how it is done on a big scale, and how they are managing the whole service. Amazon is testing in Seattle and Los Angles right now and if it’s successful, they will roll out to other major cities such as New York.