RFQ inviting proposals from consulting firms under the BIG (Business ideas for Growth)

Background:

IFMR LEAD has partnered with Harvard Business School on a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) based research project and is inviting proposals from consulting firms under the BIG (Business ideas for Growth) programme for a consulting exercise within their project in the industrial belts of Jaipur.

As a part of the study, IFMR LEAD has completed surveying close to 600 representative factories in the industrial belts of Jaipur that include units in Sanganeer, VKI, Bias Godam, Malviya Nagar, Jhotwara and Sitapuraarea. Thesemanufacturing units/ factoriesare spread across 10 broad sectors that include textile, marble and granite, leather, car component, furniture, paper making, iron work, plastic and food. As the next step of the project, we would like to engage the services of a Consulting firm to identify the problems in 100 randomly chosen factories and provide customized consulting support to these units over 8 to 10 sessions.

Nature of the factories

• They all fall within the 10 main categories mentioned above.
• They are located in the peripheral regions of the main city of Jaipur.
• They have very small sizes of about 10-50 employees each.
• Their owners often have low levels of formal education.
• These factories have had no consultancy experience in the past.

Deliverables from the consultancy firm

• 1^st Deliverable: At this stage IFMR LEAD will partner with the consultancy firm to share their findings of the field research. Based on this information, the consulting firm should be able to collaboratively identify 3-4 core areas of business across the industries as major bottlenecks of SME growth. This should take at most a week’s time.
• 2^nd Deliverable: Develop tailored modules of consulting framework based on the 3-4 identified bottlenecks in the first stage of the project. This will be independently developed by the consultancy firm. Each consulting module needs to be tailored according to the needs of each of the 100 firms which will fall within any of the 10 categories. For this, the consultants will have to visit these factories and closely observe and understand their problems. The consultancy firm should have a team of 4-5 members to finish this stage of the project within 1 month since the start of the 2^nd phase.
• 3^RD Deliverable: On ground implementation ie reaching out to the business owners and providing in-person, individual (6-8) consulting sessions over a period of 3-4 months. Given the low level of education of the business owner, this stage will require maximum hand-holding effort. The consultants need to well versed with spoken Hindi for effective communication on ground.

IFMR LEAD will provide support to the project and oversee the implementation process at every stage.

The expected benefits to the Consultancy firm are as follows:

• This project can help Consulting firms to explore less known areas of SME growth in India.
• Be a part of a cutting-edge research team based in Harvard Business School.
• Add commercial value and diversity to the consultant’s portfolio.

Timeline: The whole project needs to be delivered within a period of 5-6 months. There can be slight flexibility on this.

The interested parties should submit their brief proposal or strategy for providing consultancy services to these factories along with a rough estimate of their projected costs and timeline by 25th January, 2018.They should also include a brief portfolio of their team strength and past experience in working in SME sector.  All the details should be mailed to shubhranka.mondal@ifmr@ac.in and mallika.sridhar@ifmr.ac.in