Business Process Digitization

Business goals are different at different stages of growth. In startup mode, the primary goal is establishment of the core value proposition. As the business grows bigger, profitability and efficiency become important. And further down the road, performance predictability and robustness take the front seat. Application of technology is useful only when it is in precise alignment with the current business goal.
A musical instrument is only as good as a musician. Similarly, technology is only as good as the way in which, it is applied. It is not a magic wand. Technology is merely a tool which may - 1) Make your business more resource and cost-efficient, 2) Boost capacity and earnings and 3) Further the reach of your products and services to new geographies. Hence it is important for you to choose a skilled technology consultant, who will absorb your vision and apply it into his work.

When a business decides to invest in technology, it needs to find concrete answers to - 1) What problem(s) am I going to solve in my business? 2) What is the best technology tool that achieves the perfect balance between my budget constraints and desired output? and 3) How should the tool be applied to my business? Technology has never evolved so rapidly before, as it has today. The pace of technology innovation has become so dramatic, that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to comprehend it, let alone applying it in their business. This trend, which is set to continue for the next couple of decades at least, has started becoming problematic for businesses. The expertise needed to obtain answers to the afore-mentioned questions is becoming increasingly deep, exhaustive and unaffordable. Hence today, instead of employing experts in-house, businesses are preferring to hire outside help, - 1) which is often specialized in nature, 2) which brings additional domain and cross-domain knowledge and 3) which helps you remain updated with the latest tech developments and applications.

Our approach is quite simple. We help you find accurate answers to the questions mentioned above. Having worked with several clients in the past, we have gained sufficient knowledge and experience, using which, we will help you understand and articulate your business problem, propose feasible solutions, help you evaluate the solutions and finally do what needs to be done, to get the technology solution designed, developed, tested and rolled out in time. Building a business solution or a process solution is a complex job because it requires a team consisting of professionals with varying skill sets. Requirements & business analysts, software architects, software developers & testers, uiux designers to name a few. With an in-house team of experts, we are well equipped to understand, address, resolve and build a software solution for your business, which will make your business more predictable, easy and efficient.

We were approached by a medium-scale fertilizer manufacturing company from India. They were expanding very rapidly into newer geographies and were finding it difficult to manage their business growth as they were still using traditional paper-based record-keeping methods. They had already tried using some off-the-shelf software solutions but found them difficult to adapt to their business processes and workflows.

We conducted a few rounds of discussion with them with a focus on understanding their business. Then we first compared the pros and cons of using off-the-shelf solutions and explored any implementation possibilities. But it was quite clear that some field level constrains were quite unique to their business and adapting an off-the-shelf solution was not an advisable approach. We recommended that they should get a custom software developed for their company from scratch. They themselves had come to a similar conclusion and also had a cost-benefit analysis ready.

We then focused on their business processes and helped them identify problems associated with each. According to the business goals, every problem was then given a priority number.

Using the identified problems and their priorities we prepared a project plan. We proposed a phase-wise roll-out of the project. First phase to focus on sales-related and order management functions, which would alleviate their immediate concerns. Second phase to focus on building data-generation mechanisms that would make it easy for the management to track operations and take informed business decisions. And lastly in the third phase, we proposed building mechanisms that would enhance business efficiency and increase employee compliance. The project plan was perfectly aligned with the goals of the management. Cost and time estimate was communicated to the client in this step as well.

After the project was sanctioned, we conducted a detail requirement analysis. It consisted of - (1) Data Modelling, (2) Use-Case Analysis, (3) Workflow Analysis, (5) Software Architecture Design and (6) User Experience Analysis. At the end of this stage, the blueprint of the entire project was prepared. Cooperation from client's side was extremely important in this step.

The software specification was then handed over to the technology team which conducted the development and testing as per the project schedule.

The final solution was then released to the client.