As a final note, I must admit, after the 15 hour direct flight from Newark to Mumbai last month, I was worried about the 24 hour train ride from Delhi to Bhubaneswar, the capital of Orissa, as I had never spent close to that amount of time on a train before. Surrounded by kids- 3 in our compartment and 2 in adjoining ones, we were a far cry from the quiet car on the Acella, so productivity was much lower than anticipated.

I started the week by meeting AIACA’s Executive Director Adarsh Kumar on Sunday, March 23rd briefly for a greeting and introduction as he previously indicated that he would be out of the office most of my first two weeks there.

As a Program Officer for the Merrill Lynch Foundation, Leslie was responsible for partnership building, strategic planning, and project management for the Global Ambassadors signature programs. Her efforts helped prepare tomorrow’s global citizens by exposing youth to world issues, intercultural exchanges and the dynamics of a global economy. Prior to this role, Leslie was a Fixed Income Research Analyst at Merrill Lynch covering various sectors and rotated through ML’s London office for credit derivatives research.

We’ve just finished reviewing Gone Rural’s processes. We identified their Value Chain and mapped the corresponding information flow. Their current accounting system has been set to match the new information needs: products have been recoded, bills of materials have been created and documents have been set up to be used directly from the system (quotations, sales orders, packing slips and invoices).

We have used the historical analysis tools developed to review their current SKU’s in order to decide which are to be kept and which to discontinue, and a systematic coding process has been developed to help standardize documents and processes.