The first week of every month, there’s an Open Day at Frappe. The team-mates present their performance for the past month and share the roadmap for the coming month. For November, we had fourteen presentations, nine individuals, and five teams.

After open day, one high-performing presenter is chosen as the contributor of the month. The reason why the team decided to come up with the COTM is to call out people who raise the bar and live Frappe’s values. This could be their reward for excellent work in the form of nominations and voting. The winner is decided through a poll where each team-mate present on the call will have to cast their vote.

Getting the order to chaos at Frappe

Michelle joined Frappe in 2019 as a Consultant. She has been using ERPNext since her college days and hence the product is not new to her. Her college projects gave her a chance to work on ERPNext, where she made a few transactions and got to know the basic understanding of the system. At Frappe, she has managed different roles. She started as a Product Consultant and later switched to Operations. In her free time, she likes to listen to music, sing and occasionally play the keyboard.

When she was in the consulting team, she would dig deep into the root causes of all problems, propose changes and fix them. Gradually she thought of switching her role completely and she enjoyed watching the systems bringing some order to the chaos. It gave her a sense of happiness.

Migrating customers to the new pricing

In the initial years, ERPNext was priced very low, at times customers were paying $5 / user / month. Later, when the modules expanded, along with ERPNext, the small-sized customers also made a sound profit but they were on the old plans. Michelle started with churn calls and graphs where she came up with an idea to migrate the old customers to the new pricing.

After a constant follow-up and analysis, she proposed new pricing to the team. Saurabh helped her with the plan of action. While executing the migration plan, Michelle faced several challenges but she resolved them successfully and introduced the legacy plans by disabling the older plans.

Becoming ISO 27001:2013 & ISO 9001:2015 certified

Last February in one of the Friday Forums, the team discussed getting an ISO 27001:2013 & ISO 9001:2015 certification for Frappe. Being a flat organization, the aim was to bring excellence in everything we do and the team thought that the right way to get organized is to implement ISO. It will help strengthen the quality of work and get ISMS (Information Security Management System) and QMS (Quality Management system) in place.

Michelle was the Management Representative and took ownership of the whole process. She initiated the audit process by setting objectives, finding the missing processes, implementing them, and monitoring them periodically. Michelle and Mayank were actively involved in incorporating ISO 27001:2013 & ISO 9001:2015. They managed the first Management Review Meeting and successfully completed the internal and external audits (Stage 1 and 2). This audit helped us get a letter of recommendation for being an ISO 27001:2013 & ISO 9001:2015 compliant organization.

After achieving the above two milestones, she also contributed to several other projects. She did revenue analysis for all the departments with Mallika and worked on the processes to streamline implementation partner access in Frappe.io with the implementation team to name a few.

Deciding the contributor of the month

The key to getting acknowledgment for your accomplishments at Frappe is to keep your work transparent and share it with your fellow team-mates. It helps you get instant feedback that creates a scope for improvement, secondly, this is your immediate dopamine booster. :)

Like always, the team-mates presented their work and the contributor of the month was selected based on votes. The below-mentioned screenshot is the poll conducted to decide the best performer. Michelle got the maximum number of votes.

(Poll Result)

Words by the winner

Michelle contributed largely by keeping in mind what impact her work will have in the longer run. She feels elated to be acknowledged as the Contributor of the month. And adds, “we will not be able to see the impact on the systems immediately, but since our focus is on excellence, the only aim for ISO was to bring excellence to our systems. Bringing quality in what we do, So that we deliver the best product and services to all our stakeholders. Secondly, this will also help us get into the enterprise market.”

Amidst this whole process, she gained a lot of insights into how organizations with multiple departments, how they sync well. Overlooking the operations of 10 departments gave her a sense of responsibility and she is grateful that Frappe trusted her with this.