Ayush Dubey’s Journey from Digital Transformation at P&G to Yale

What he unearthed was shocking! His research revealed that approximately 15 million supply-chain-focused MSMEs contribute 12% to India’s GDP and make up around 30% of the MSME sector fail to scale due to inadequate digitization. Limited revenue scales, costly solutions from Western markets, and inexpensive labor hinder technology adoption, creating a cycle of reduced earnings due to deficient digitization, subsequently constraining funds for digital investments.

He realized he had to find a solution for this. That’s when he decided to pivot to Procter & Gamble (P&G) to pursue digital transformation in pharmaceuticals.

His experience at P&G provided him with opportunities to work at two different sites – one that was newly acquired from Merck Healthcare and another at an advanced P&G site. At the advanced P&G site, he worked with cutting-edge tools, whereas at the newly acquired site, he set up the infrastructure from the ground up.

This experience inspired him to help MSMEs digitize their supply chains. He realized that by setting up a practice that provides low-cost in-house digitization solutions to smaller businesses that suffer due to a lack of knowledge and awareness of digital solutions, he can create a larger impact on society.

This drive led him down the path of business schools where he’ll be focusing on learning the nuances of business operations across different industries and developing solutions leveraging new-age technologies.

Simar, a fellow MBA Admissions Consultant from our team recently sat down with him for a coffee chat to discuss his application journey. In this conversation, Ayush shared his experience of working on his MBA applications and how he made it to M7 MBAs. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Question 1. How did you decide to work with Admissions Gateway?

“  had been contemplating my current situation, specifically my experience at Procter & Gamble Healthcare. I had worked at two different sites – one that was newly acquired from Merck Healthcare and another at an advanced P&G site. At the advanced P&G site, I had the opportunity to work with cutting-edge tools, whereas at the newly acquired site, I was responsible for setting up the infrastructure from the ground up. Initially, I had planned to wait another year before applying for new opportunities, hoping to gain more experience and work on regional projects.

However, a senior from my college recommended I should just reach out to Admissions Gateway and see if my profile fits and if I can already apply.

I had a detailed call with Mudit where we discussed my profile and if I need to gain more experience to apply for business schools. He pushed me to reflect on where I am currently and how that in itself has sufficient content to get started.

He made me realize that setting something from ground up is also a very valuable experience. And that experience you should really try to leverage through applying this year only instead of waiting another year. So that is how I started applying in the last year.”

Question 2. How was your overall experience working with Nisha and Mudit at Admissions Gateway?

“I worked on my LORs and resume with Mudit, and he really helped me fine-tune it. It was quite helpful in terms of changing my perspective on resumes.

We started with Rajdeep’s sessions, and I began thinking about my resume entirely in a new context, which was really beneficial. I feel like I have ingrained that perspective, and it has really changed how I look at my work, even at P&G when I brand my work or showcase what I’ve worked on, such as when I create newsletters. I now focus more on strategic aspects rather than operational ones.

This change wasn’t just limited to the application process; it also helped me at P&G. Specifically regarding the resume, yes, there were many iterations, around 10-11, but I think we eventually came up with the best version. From where I started, it used to seem like a run-of-the-mill resume, but where we ended up was worlds apart. I also showed it to a few of my seniors and friends, and they gave great reviews. I felt that it was a great experience, and I learned a lot, not just from the application point of view but also from my personal brand perspective.

I made sure to focus on positioning my letters of recommendation (LORs) to highlight my strengths. I had several iterations with Mudit sir to ensure that my strengths were effectively portrayed. The stories I prepared for my LORs also turned out to be beneficial during interviews. For instance, I hadn’t initially considered the impact of leading a digital training session that led to 83 employees transitioning from probation to full-time employment. During a Yale interview, when asked about my biggest accomplishment, I mentioned this achievement, which I previously overlooked. Through these exercises, I learned to view things from a more human perspective rather than just focusing on business and numbers.

With Nisha mam, I worked on my essays. We spent time fine-tuning my goals, which initially took some brainstorming, but eventually, we were able to craft a compelling narrative. My profile had some discontinuity due to a brief product management stint, which didn’t seem to fit the overall narrative of my work in digital transformation. However, we were able to bridge this gap in my story using my family background, aligning with my dad’s company’s challenges and the corresponding timelines. The iterative process of refining the essays and understanding each school’s values also proved invaluable during subsequent interviews.

I would say that the experience with both Mudit sir and Nisha mam greatly contributed to my success.”

Question 3. Can you walk me through your core MBA Application Narrative?

It started from my father’s background in R&D pharma. After two decades of experience in Pharmaceuticals, we decided to start a pharma manufacturing business.

But because my dad had more experience in the R&D domain, he did not have much info about how you can digitally transform stuff, how you can digitize or automate stuff. So we faced lots of value erosion through that. For example, sometimes there were quality rejects, there were lots of clients sending back products because it was not labeled properly or lots of quality issues.

And for a small business, these values were not easy to absorb. If I observe a similar thing at a P&G type firm, it’s hardly a hit. But for a small business, that was loss making.

So eventually we paused that business and my dad again resumed work. This happened around the time when I was at ICICI Banking Product Management. This motivated me to learn digital transformation, and identify how we can digitally transform supply chains.

When I deep dived into how other companies function. I realized that there are lots of statistics supporting that several million MSMEs fail every year because of the lack of digitization or because primarily digital tools are mostly from Western markets. So this is a problem I also face in P&G. It’s very high cost and doesn’t justify reapplying those in India.

This leads to lower revenues most of the time and that in turn leaves you unable to invest much in digital transformation and the cycle continues. So this was my starting aspect for my long term vision. I decided I want to set up my own enterprise in India wherein I would also consult with these MSMEs and provide them low cost in-house developed digital solutions. This way, they can digitize or automate their supply chains.

An instance from P&G that I’d like to add here is – when I joined P&G, they had newly acquired a site from Merck. Merck was entirely manual based. It was not at all where P&G tries to be. I set everything from the ground up and faced quite a few challenges.

The average age of the 350+ employees at Merck legacy was 45. Whereas in P&G, we have a relatively young crowd in the early 30s. So we had to navigate some cultural challenges. We had to teach them how to use digital tools and had to convince the senior leadership to make digital investments.

We had several conversations to break things down and enable mindset shifts. So that really helped me gain a lot of exposure and convince myself as well that digitization is the need for the future.

And then post that around after two years there, I got a role expansion to another advanced Femcare site. So the second site was P&G Femcare. Here I got to lead the entire digital portfolio.

I have been working here for the past eight months. I got promoted in March as well. So here I am working more on the cutting edge side of tools, which I initially used to envision P&G using. Since this is an already advanced site, I am able to work on advanced stuff such as leveraging AI, IoT and those sorts of things and digitizing or automating operations which I find really exciting and I believe the future lies here.

In terms of my short term goal, post-MBA I want to get into an MBB consulting firm to focus on digital supply chain transformation with clients like Johnson & Johnson, and P&G and for that matter even other similar firms in the logistics space. Basically different aspects of the supply chain so that I can eventually 7-8 years down the line I can launch my own consulting enterprise.

And I think if you want to get into consulting, Yale is a very good place to be at because from what I’ve heard, I think it’s one of the business schools, which has a lot of conversion to the MBBs, especially for folks who want to focus on social impact in the long term.

Question 4. Can you please share how your interview process was?

I interviewed at Kellogg and at Yale.

To understand more about the schools, I had a lot of alumni chats. There was also a session on networking, like you need to network with people for the essays. So based on this, I already had started reaching out to people.

I reached out to several people. Not everyone responds, but the people who respond, I used to have 15-20 minutes of targeted discussions with them. So that helped me gain first hand perspective.

So in the eventual interview, I was able to actually communicate. There were questions on how you would improve the Yale community. What do you see in Yale MBA experience? What was their outreach like? How did you come to the decision that this is the right time for an MBA?

So those sorts of questions were very easily answered because I actually had talked to the people. So that was one thing.

Rajdeep also conducted an interview session. So we started from there. We started building up our examples, like having a story and rebranding it in different ways to see how we can use the same example for different sets of questions and highlight specific parts of those. So the interview process for me seemed pretty straightforward post the sessions.

Initially I was under the impression that they can ask literally anything. And then I got to know that the answers that you have, you can just repurpose those on the spot as well. So I prepared that. I had some stories and I also took the help of my LORs. I took the help of my essays.

So that is how my interviews were. Yale had additional aspects to it, like video interviews. The same was for Kellogg as well.

So the video interview was there. And then there was a psychometric test. That was something different in Yale.

And then the final interviews of Kellogg and Yale were similar for me.

Question 5. What was one of your biggest takeaways from the sessions?

Earlier, when someone would ask me about my biggest accomplishment, I used to think about it in terms of maximum financial impact. But through Rajdeep’s session, I realized that the maximum impact you can make is transforming human lives or sustainability for the environment.

This really shifted my perspective and I highlighted these more over the financial games themselves. And I think this is something I’ll continue and carry forward as well.

there is something missing in this answer it does not crisply answers the question. It talks a lot about external things