I
clearly recall my first assignment as a management consultant with McKinsey. We were working with a tire manufacturer and my Principal asked me to design a new sales forecasting solution. The solution I came up with combined the statistical techniques with subjective assessments of the people on the ground. With an immediate go-ahead, I was asked to implement it in three days wherein I was to create a system that we could run and test the model on.
The exhilaration soon turned to desperation. Our IT team needed a minimum 3 months along with well laid out requirements before they could program it. Clearly a no go. This paper based solution wasn’t even feasible as the data had to be collected for a large number of products, and that too from people spread all over the globe. I panicked and in my desperation I created a sort of clunky solution in Excel – various people will email their filled out template, I would then painfully collate them into one big spreadsheet and thereafter marry it to the past sales data. The work flow was painfully slow and daunting, but we didn’t have a choice. Over the next two decades, nothing really changed. This issue would repeat itself, almost always. And it became an expected norm.
We, as Consultants/Turn-around CEO’s, just accepted it as a part of the process. Though we yearned for a better, faster and accurate solution.And then, there seemed to be a solution, finally. During a project of acquiring and merging of multiple plumbing and HVAC companies (which did not even have any well-defined processes, forget IT solutions) I had to come up with a way to digitize the entire business workflow. My solution was based on Airtable and Zapier. The solution not only allowed the user to create a system that is being used by many people but also the flexibility of evolving it over time. Many years later the system is still in use.
Since then, I have worked with numerous no-code tools to solve an assortment of business problems. Sleepless nights and copious amounts of coffee led to creation of MuZero.
MuZero is created to solve the problem of digitizing business processes, which usually change at the speed of light. It’s an alternative to a full blown IT solutions vertical/portfolio of one-off solutions that usually create more headaches than they solve. It’s a rapid prototyping of a solution that is deployable, impactful and solves 80-90% of the business problem, without the bells and whistles. It’s a solution for management consultants and business leaders where time to market and cost of implementation is critical.
