What issues did you and very50 focus on during your MoG Project?
All of the people in my village really appreciated Japanese MoG members' spirit, especially for their commitment to the MoG projects. For example Genteng Healthy Market starts at 4am, with our peak hours being between 5 am and 7 am. They all woke up at 5am just to come see what our daily operations were like.
I appreciated MoG members for their ideas and their analytical capacity to improve Genteng Healthy Market. They observed and evaluated every aspect of our business and the problems we were encountering. They proposed a lot of ideas and suggestions to our organization. We had no break time and had dozens of meetings with the team every single day.
What was the biggest change during your MoG Project?
Genteng Healthy Market pursued MoG project in August 2012 and July 2013. During both of the MoG projects, we together focused on three aspects of our project, (1) sanitation, (2) marketing, (3) shop management. Those three issues are the basic problem in our organization because we empower local people without business knowledge. Moreover, most of our people are not educated with very limited formal education. For this reason, MoG is very important to help us to make our problem maps and try to find the best solutions to every obstacle, problem and social issue in our organization. On the other hand, the capacity of MoG member in running survey is very valuable input for our organization because we can evaluate our work based on real findings.
What "output" did the MoG program create from your business?
During MoG 2012, we produced several new improvement programs for Genteng Healthy Market in marketing, sanitation, and shop management. One example is that we separated male and female bathrooms, which is new for traditional markets in Indonesia. Furthermore, the MoG members gave us a lot of suggestions to be implemented after the on-site MoG program. One of these was to host a "Music Concert" as a promotional effort. We ran this program in June 2013, and more than 2000 people from surrounding areas came to the concert. It was a very successful endeaor and attracted a lot of new customers to our market. Currently, our organization is running several programs based on suggestions from the MoG 2013. We received a lot of input from very50 and are trying to apply those ideas to Genteng Healthy Market.