My Digital Wallpapers

When I am tired or feeling helpless or sometime when I do not have solution to a particular problem even after so much of efforts; I have to divert my mind to save it from blowing up. Creating a "Digital Art" is one of my favorite diversion technique. I am not an artist and I can not design a professional looking website. I know only little bit of Adobe Photoshop, and through that I create something which pleases my mind.

Most of the time when I create "Digital Art", it is a desktop wallpaper with a quotable quote. Followings are few of wallpapers I created using different versions of Adobe Photoshop. All images are of 1024 x 768 dimensions.

	Click to Enlarge Quote : "Know love, know happiness. No love, no happiness."
	Click to Enlarge Quote : "Follow the trail of your dreams, not the path of others' expectations."
	Click to Enlarge Quote : N/A
	Click to Enlarge Quote : N/A

In my next post, I will share my creation of spiritual wallpapers based on Symbol "OM" with some of best inspirational/spiritual quotations.

For my all wallpaper creations; you may like to visit http://maulikdave.blogspot.com/search/label/wallpaper.

Do you want a customized desktop wallpaper designed especially for you? For corporate branding or for personal use? Contact Me for same. Or click here for more information.

 My Digital Wallpapers
 

Case Study : Sales Force Automation System : Development, Rollout and Change Management

As defined in Wikipedia: Sales force management systems are information systems used in marketing and management that automate some sales and sales force management functions. They are frequently combined with a marketing information system, in which case they are often called customer relationship management systems.

When I was employed with Torrent Pharmaceuticals Limited (www.torrentpharma.com), SFA was the first project I got to work on. Torrent has over 800 products registered in over 27 countries. Torrent created an IT enabled Business Environment through deployment of SAP in its headquarter, two manufacturing plants, one research center and numbers of foreign subsidiaries. But, people who were always on move, who really generated the sales for the company - the strong sales force of 3000+ people; did not get any direct benefit of this IT enabled Business Environment. For them, a separate system catering to their specific needs was required. That gave birth to idea of SFA roll out.

Our business case was:

1. Wanted to minimize/eliminate writing work
2. Improve productivity
3. Better Customer, Business, Industry focus
4. Data capturing at source
5. Immediate feedback from seniors
6. Free up time for high value activities
7. Morale of field force
8. Online availability of Sales, Goods return and stock data
9. Torrent news from HO/Market
10. Discussion forums
11. E-Mail & Medical Information
12. Increase in productivity & earnings
13. Overall – Gain Competitive Advantage

Approach to a problem & Change Management

Following figure illustrates the hierarchy of Sales Force

Typically, in other pharma companies, requirements were gathered from HQ; who does not know actual problems in field, develop the system and then force the system on sales force. These were always a failure. But, we took different pathway. We wanted to involve Sales Force - the actual user; in every phase of development. We wanted them to own the system. We selected a team of actual users for pilot testing. And then...

• Launched the system for one zone at a time
• First zone with only basic functionality
• Every next zone with improved interface and useful features developed with input from previous zones
• Sufficient training and testing time given before LIVE date for each zone
• Time gap between two zone going LIVE

Following figure illustrates the SFA Architecture

In our training to sales force, we also faced problem like people with zero computer literacy. We treated them separately by giving them computer knowledge first. 24 Hours telephonic support was given. In initial roll out, many time I received calls for support around 2AM during month end(closing time).

In the end, I and my team were gained by the knowledge of functions and sales life cycle of a pharmaceutical company. But, most important to us was, we were able to simplify life of sales representatives; that was our real success.

 Case Study : Sales Force Automation System : Development, Rollout and Change Management
 

Nine years, Nine countries, Seven industries and counting....

Being in IT field since 9 years helped me to become a truly global citizens. It has given me chance to work with people from different cultures, societies and background.

In my 9 years, I worked for clients from India, USA, UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, Croatia, France and UAE while employed at different companies here in India. I also got chance to visit UK, the only foreign country I visited so far. In IT development field, most of the time you are not required to visit a client, all the communications done through phone, fax, email and messenger programs. During all my employment years, I did not only kept learning new technologies but I also learned about importance of communication with client for successful completion of a project.

I experienced couple of set-backs because of communication problem. Specially in Germany and UAE where client's fluency in English was average and me and my team's fluency in their language and culture was about zero. It was initial problem though, after we set our frequency right, there were fewer problems.

In my 9 years, I worked for clients from different industries like Engineering & Constructions, Fashions & Apparel, Sports, Government organizations, Information Technology, Stock-trading, Data warehousing companies, Human Resource Services, Health Care & Beauty etc.

While working with different industries, most important lesson I learned was; "To accomplish the project to the client's satisfaction, you need to understand their business fairly well." Project Management is just not about gathering requirements, develop a software! You need to learn about all the functions of a company your software is going to affect and also how they function.

In my next post, I am going to describe how we bunch of IT nerds who did not have any knowledge of how Pharmaceutical company work, learned about industry, approached change management and solved problem of communication for project Sales Force Automation.

 Nine years, Nine countries, Seven industries and counting....
 

Curriculum Vitae - Maulik Dave

Synopsis:

	8+ years experience in application and database development.
	1 year experience in IT Training.
	Skills involve developing and managing team to achieve objectives.
	Experience in projects like Sales Force Automation, online MIS system, ecommerce web sites, Content & Event Management and more...
	Integrated 3rd party and legacy systems with newly developed system.

Skill summary:

	DOT NET(VB), ASP 3.0
	MS-SQL (Stored Procedure, Cursors, Indexing, XML Output, SQL Injection prevention etc)
	JavaScript/AJAX, XHTML, CSS
	Adobe Photoshop

Career Highlights (in reverse chronological order):

Employer:	BiznessBee IT Solutions Pvt Ltd, Ahmedabad, India
Duration:	1-Apr-2006 to 15-May-2008
Designation:	Sr. Developer

• Developed couple of multilingual websites with.NET localization feature; also language selected is Arabic, layout changes from left to right.
• Was sent to London to meet a client, gather requirements, delegate tasks to team, design and develop a prototype and get approval.
• Designed robust database & search system for a massive database of 10.2 million+ records of USA’s FEIN (Federal Employee Identification Numbers) for a client from USA.

Employer:>	Torrent Pharmaceuticals Ltd, Ahmedabad, India
Duration:	1-July-2004 to 31-March-2006
Designation:	AssAssistant Manager – IT Department

• Designed, developed and trained field staff & different departments for web based Sales Force Automation system.
  • Integrated with SAP to provide sales & goods return data to field staff.
  • Integrated 3rd party software to broadcast text messages to field staff’s mobile containing critical sales data on month closing.
  • Covered functions of complete field hierarchy as well as few departments at HO.
  • Handles 1,000,000 plus daily transactions.
  • Reduced reporting time from 15 days to a single day.
  • Won third position in ‘Best Corporate Application’ by Computer Society of India, Mumbai chapter.
• Saved thousand of papers and huge cost for Corporate Communication department by e-enabling their processes.
• Designed, developed and trained employees to use Employee Self Service portal.>
• Integrated with number of legacy systems to provide single logon.
• Integrated 3rd party bio-metric attendance system.
• Designed & developed bi-lingual Sales Force Automation system for company’s German subsidiary.
• Was provided German (Deutsche) language training.

Employer:	Plus One Technical Solutions Pvt Ltd, Ahmedabad, India
Duration:	1-Jan-2001 to 30-Jun-2004
DesDesignation:	Programmer

• It is a subsidiary of Virginia, USA based company.
• Used classical ASP, MS-SQL, XML and XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) extensively.
• Successfully completed assigned modules like Content Management, Contact management, Event & Resource Management.i>

Employer:	Cyber7 Technologies, Ahmedabad, India
Duration:	1-Jul-1999 to 31-Dec-2000
Designation:	JunJunior Developer

• Successfully completed number of website assignments which needed extensive use of classic ASP, MS-Access, HTML, CSS and little bit of Adobe Photoshop.

Technical Skills:

• ASP.NET, ASP 3.0, AJAX/JavaScript, VBScript
• HTML / DHTML / XML / XSLT / CSS
• MS-SQL 2005, MS-SQL 2000, MS-Access
• Adobe PhotoShop & ImageReady
• MS FrontPage, DreamWeaver
• Win XP, Win 2000, Dos 6.22, and Red Hat Linux
• IIS 5 and above, Basics of Networking

Education: <

1998	Bachelor of Science (Mathematics)	Canterbury University, Cheshire, UK
1998	Diploma in Information and Systems Management	NCC Education & Training, U.K. in affiliation with APTECH Computer Education

Certificates: (from Brainbench Incorporation, USA)

	HTML Programmer	8-Jan-2000
	JavaScript Programmer	24-Apr-2000
	Web Programmer	16-May-2000
	Adobe Photoshop 5.5	4-Oct-2000
	E-commerce Concepts	5-Oct-2000
	WWW Concepts	8-Oct-2000

Languages know:     English, Hindi, Gujarati and preliminary German

Passport Number:     A9174365

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I believe TEAM means – Together Everyone Achieves Moreore.

 Curriculum Vitae - Maulik Dave