The Cashew Plant

We’ve been working now for nearly a week, getting to know the factory, the main owner, Sam, and our boss, Valentine. The factory has about 100 employees at any given time, although it’s difficult to establish this number (Sam does not know either). They all have one of four main roles: cutting cashews, peeling cashes, grading cashews or doing ‘general work’ (we’re trying to figure out what ‘general work’ means). Sam has two general managers and an accountant who is trying to learn excel from us.

Overall, it’s a very simple business: Sam collects cashews from local farmers, processes them with the help of his 100 employees, and sells them all to one European exporter. There is very little automation used and almost no electricity (to burn the stove, cashew shells are used). The plant has been in operation for about 2.5 months and we’ve been told that our main goal should be making sure that it’s profitable.

Profitable? Once we started looking at things in detail, it became apparent how much work this will involve. There is very little overall understanding of how much input goes into the plant vs. how much output comes out. Although there is some attempt at record keeping, most of it goes into an ever-growing amount of notebooks that get filled in with written numbers, then tucked away. A computer was added to keep track of records about 2 weeks ago, and now the accountant is playing catch-up.

We’re glad that we’re here so early in the process so that we can truly help with the operations, accounting, and finance side of things. Most of our days so far have been filled with chatting with the supervisors and the accountant and creating excel spreadsheets that can be used as tools to monitor the business. It’s a lot of work, but we hope that we can make a lot of progress in the short time that we’re here.

Everyday we get into our rented 4WD Suzuki and drive to our ‘office’ where we take out our laptops and start asking questions and building spreadsheet. I must say, it’s quite similar to my previous employment, but in so many ways, much simpler, yet, hopefully our work will have a greater impact.