Choosing technology could mean different things to different companies:

• For an end user company, choosing technology could mean better ROI.
• For an IT services company, choosing technology could mean competitive edge.
• For a technology product company though, it means choosing between life and death. The story of OrangeScape is just about that.

OrangeScape was founded in the year 2003, with the vision of simplifying application development. OrangeScape found its inspiration from Microsoft excel, which makes application development so simple that business users themselves could put together an application for their usecase. However, excel is not meant for application development. So, it lacks basic features of an application such as multi-user capability and centralized database. So, OrangeScape was created to be the best of both worlds i.e. to create applications in an excel like development interface, but to run it for enterprise scale.

Companies that were using Excel for business applications, but not able to consolidate data across enterprise, found OrangeScape to be an ideal platform to build business applications. So OrangeScape attracted big names in the industry such as Astrazenca, Citi and Hindustan Unilever as customers. The primary value proposition of OrangeScape became faster development due to its application development simplification. So, invariably OrangeScape got compared against rapid application development tools and workflow tools during the sales cycles. This was a competitive market with established player like Microsoft and IBM. Hence, it became a positioning problem for OrangeScape in a crowded market, although OrangeScape’s approach towards application development was very different.

Then, Cloud computing was born. Cloud delivered servers and databases on the Internet on a pay-by-use model. With Cloud, you don’t have to install, run and maintain servers. All you need, is to swipe your credit-card and start using them on the Internet. This dramatically simplified the infrastructure management problem that companies faced to run their existing applications. But, Cloud created new set of rules for building applications for pay-by-use model. So application development on Cloud was no longer similar to traditional application development. This created a void in the Cloud application development skillset . Especially, building applications on the Cloud became a challenge for application developers, who were used to standard tools like Visual Basic.

Meanwhile, OrangeScape saw Cloud as a natural extension to its vision to simplify development and ongoing management of applications. So, OrangeScape decided to choose Cloud as its technology platform, early-on. To adopt to this new model, OrangeScape rewrote its entire codebase and repositioned itself as a cloud development platform. It took more than a year for the entire engineering team to create its Cloud version in the year 2008.

With this new OrangeScape version, application developers could build applications and deploy them directly on to Cloud. With the rapidness and simplification of building applications, OrangeScape became akin to Visual Basic on Cloud. Thus, OrangeScape created a new market segment called the Visual PaaS – a segment which we believe is poised to grow with the mainstream adoption of Cloud.

The market recognition for OrangeScape in the last 2 years reinforces that belief:

• OrangeScape signed up with new partners like TCS and AnvilCloud in Europe and US and acquired new customers in that geography.
• OrangeScape got listed in the 10 recognized Cloud platforms across the world by leading analysts like Gartner and Forrester.
• OrangeScape was named as one of the top 50 Startups world-wide at TiECon 2011 and several other accolades from Forbes and CRN.

The re-incarnation of OrangeScape is more than just a technology choice. It is about choosing a market. When you are an early adopter in the right market, technology choice has the power to transform a product company’s future to a whole new level and OrangeScape is a standing example of that.

We have installed ERP system at our manufacturing and trading facilities since 01/04/2010. We started the process with the vendor in Jan-10 and gradually incorporated all the modules like purchase, sales, stores, accounts, inventory, planning etc in phase wise and have gone live since 1st April 2010.

“I can easily excess my group companies’ daily and monthly update by a single click, which I used to get in physical report of 100 odd pages without keen analysis from my team. Even my secretary can excess the customised details and prepare a simple report for me in just 60 seconds”

About Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System:

1. Which circumstances turned Team Rajiv to implement ERP system?
   
   There was indeed a need of ERP system to integrate all business management functions, including planning, inventory/materials management, engineering, order processing, manufacturing, purchasing, accounting and finance, human resources, trading, exporting and more.

   The management surveyed by discussion the ground level team of whole Rajiv Group and found that at all layer, a real time data integration is required to smoothen the processes.

2. What was the biggest challenge faced by Team Rajiv while thinking to install ERP system?
   
   Compatibility of Team Rajiv’s existing employees with a new proposed ERP system was more time consuming process. Challenge was to train according the new modules of the system and keep track of any misfortune of whole system.
3. What difference Team Rajiv was looking to make with an introduction of structured IT system?Real time stock management, real time trading update, keep track on arbitrage sales loss/opportunity, manage customer profiles and their preferences etc.
4. Is your ERP system catering internal as well as external management information? How? Example please.More of internal operations are covered under ERP system currently. We will look forward to integrate with our long term prestigious clients and agencies after extensive experience of new system.

Earlier Team Rajiv’s marketing and manufacturing forecasts were not matching each other. Manufacturing used to claim that marketing division is over committing to the clients to achieve the targets but not considering the manufacturing capacity. Those problems are now totally solved as marketing people know what is happening in back-yard and manufacturing people sets the order as per the ERP system only.

1. What sort of customization is available in the ERP system which was not possible or tough before? Maintaining customer profiles and their preferences are helping us to know the buying pattern and specific demand growth if any. This helps us to understand our clients and we could try impulse marketing in the right way.
2. Name the main businesses in Team Rajiv that are growing because of ERP. Please elaborate by giving few more information?A flagship company of Team Rajiv – Rajiv Petrochemicals Pvt. Ltd. having total turnover of Rs. 380 crore in 2010-11 is taking a continuous pace of growth in comparison to last two years. Our sale for the polypropylene and polyethylene has gone high in Gujarat State. We could manage our orders and supplies with zero error and that added more trust and reliability into our agency partner.
3. How much time took to migrate the old data into ERP system? Any challenges faced which increased the cost of implementing the ERP? If yes, how much was that?We had chosen two phases to implement the whole system. In phase I, we collected and put all data streamline. We managed even the missing links to compile the whole back support database. Then we started implementing it from both the ends, lower management and top management as a taste drive. It took us around 4 months to make it live after we gave training to staff into phase II.Challenges mainly faced were giving training to the old age staff was cumbersome due to lack of basic system knowledge. No major cost increased due to delay of implementation.
4. Is ERP saving time and cost? How and how much so far? Yes of course, we could save time and energy of marketing people by matching two ends as one is manufacturing which is very important. Around 6% operating cost was saved in manufacturing division by following ERP system.

The area of knowledge management is something that is very old and very well studied; large enterprises spend a lot of their mindshare towards it. Even at Nagarro we have worked on many mediums through which knowledge is shared (intranet, team wikis, organizational learning databases, internal blogs, forums, etc.). However, what we have discovered is that the amount of knowledge shared through these mediums is not the same as the amount that is created. Another thing that we noticed is that enough people weren’t volunteering to write an article, or create a new knowledge topic, or share new interesting stuff that they have read. We tried to incentivize people through recognitions. We tried technologies such as SharePoint to create platforms that would make it easy for people to create knowledge. Somehow, it wasn’t working out.

One of the things that we found out is that it is very hard to mandate people into creating knowledge. Additional recognition doesn’t help; monetary incentives don’t help either. So, we can’t tell someone in the architecture group to write at least one new article a week – they would always be too busy with work to do this. Or, we couldn’t get the travel desk to release new travel tips every month based on the number of people who were traveling. It turns out that creating knowledge is a creative process; and numerous studies show that incentivizing or mandating creative processes is actually counter-productive. So, we decided to turn the problem around.

We introduced something called k-mined (short for knowledge mined) – we developed a knowledge sharing platform by borrowing ideas from two of the Internet’s most famous properties: reddit and stackoverflow. K-mined is a platform that allows users to share thoughts, ideas, links, documents, etc. in a very simple to use manner; and it allows users to rate, comment upon, and consume the shared content. It may not sound like much, however, within 2 months of rollout to a pilot user base of 50 users, we had 350 articles submitted, 700 comments, 50 new topics created, and 275 tags were added to tag the content. Above all, we had over 17,000 views – on average each user had visited k-mined over 300 times. We were on to something here – what was happening?

We allowed absolute freedom for people to do whatever they wanted. There is no approval process, no mandatory submission requirements, no moderation, and no pre-meditated bucketing of content. The users choose to create what they want. The users choose to consume what they want; to comment on what they find interesting; to add to an article by sharing their own expertise or experience. The quality of the content shared is controlled by the users themselves – good interesting content is rated more, has more comments, and ranks better on k-mined.

We made k-mined very responsive. It is blazing fast; it doesn’t take more than half a second to serve any page on the platform. This is very important since people are doing things voluntarily and we don’t want them to feel that this is a chore. We take any feedback very seriously; most feedback is incorporated within a week and rolled out. We made it fun to use – users sometimes suggest changes to the logo of k-mined, and we incorporate those; users sometimes upload their own logo, and we use them. Everyone gets a feeling of participation – and none of this is solicited, it’s all voluntary.

Once the sharing started, the consumption followed. We see comic strips being shared by users being used in presentations that people make. We see our sales team using content that is shared by the delivery teams in their sales pitches. We see ideas being shared and users from totally different teams collaborating to make these ideas a reality. We have a platform which our users voluntarily flock to in order to share what they have on their mind.

There are reasons for why we chose to custom implement this platform, instead of buying a market leading tool – first one is cost. K-mined has been developed by a group of developers in house on their own time – yes, even the development of the platform is on a voluntary basis. Ask a developer to work extra hours for a project that is to be delivered to a client, and it is mostly met with a frown; ask developers to make something cool where they have complete freedom on the choice of technology and features, and they will work nights and weekends to create it. Our developers make use of various technologies and tools for the application (asp.net for the base platform, Amazon SES for emails, quartz.net for scheduling, lucene.net for search, JQuery templates, HTML5, etc.) and have a lot of fun learning some of these technologies. The choice of the technology is totally up to the developer. We didn’t need to have any upfront investments for something that initially was experimental at best. In essence, the entire platform has been created at no cost to Nagarro. And everyone who participates in the development picks up additional skills while having a lot of fun.

Another reason to make a custom platform is flexibility. The biggest thing our users appreciate is that any user feedback is analyzed and incorporated very quickly. A custom platform gives us this freedom and ability; the developers know the platform well and can tweak it very quickly to implement most of the feedback items.

We are getting a lot of benefit out of k-mined now that it is in full swing. We have employees who are happy and excited about a knowledge sharing tool. We frequently see users posting content which is amplified by other users by adding to the same content from their own experience and research. We hear people referring to posts on k-mined and sending links that they found interesting to their team members. We are still innovating on how to increase the stickiness of the platform, and how to improve the discoverability of content already shared on k-mined – it is a continuously evolving process.

As a services company we find that any innovation is a competitive advantage. When we see that our employees are using a common collaboration platform to exchange ideas, we are very happy because this helps drive innovation. For example, through an idea shared on k-mined, two people met each other and formed a repository for prototypes that are created by various projects as part of their R&D effort. Now, we have a repository which can be searched by everyone in Nagarro, whereas earlier these prototypes would lie in isolation in various project repositories. Nagarro takes pride in being a trusted advisor to its clients, and such initiatives help us be better advisors across the board.

In retrospect, something that started as an experiment has worked out very well for us. As a services company which provides technology solutions to its clients, our strength lies in our knowledge of software development technologies. What we do wrong sometimes is to make a mistake of thinking that technology is the answer to every problem. Through k-mined, we realized that it is much more important to figure out how to use technology in a way that it makes sense to people – to use it in a way which makes it feel natural. We have great expectations from k-mined and we have an equally great number of things planned. It will be an exciting journey.

The Emperor’s New Clothes
In early 2007, as I transitioned from being CEO of WNS Knowledge Services (a Division of WNS Global Services, the first Indian BPO to list on NYSE) to Founder & CEO of Aspire, it was clear to me that technology will play a critical role in process management, intellectual property creation and most importantly, in scalability and profitability. What I did not know was the way to go about this. The first cheque I signed in June 2007, ahead of the business launch on 1 July 2007 was an Advance to a technology services company to help build a technology platform “TracHire”, which was to be the backbone for our flagship product, “NeoHire”.

The brief to the Firm was clear. Aspire was going to solve the industry and nation’s foremost problem: skills development. We believed we had intellectual high-ground as our business model (on paper) was robust. We believed that the three challenges facing Human Resource Managers- high attrition rates, wage inflation and talent scarcity could be resolved the same way as Manufacturers resolve their supply chain challenges: using Automation (MRPs/ERPs) across their Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers; using Research & Development to re-engineer supply chain processes and drive efficiencies through the system; and, measure value creation through “Total Cost of Ownership” or TCO methodologies.

I firmly believed (as I do now) that Aspire can address the challenges for talent-intensive corporations by building “human talent supply chains” which would extend to the mines of talent across India- schools, colleges and universities in Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities. Aspire would deliver a multi-tier training model: general employability training inside colleges, pre-process and process training inside regional Aspire academies and final product trainings inside corporations. Talent would flow seamlessly to the Employers. This product was named “NeoHire” and the technology platform “ProHire”.

We were on a high. We had an INR 2.5 crore order even before we launched. Every corporation we spoke with got excited. I approached 35 CXOs for angel investment- 28 chose to invest. We also got a VC and including my savings, we raised 20 Crores. Doing this on the heel of three successes of building McKinsey Knowledge Centre (McKC), FreeMarkets and WNS (last two listed successfully) made me over-confident and I believed I could do no wrong. I ignored the advice: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”. The Emperor had new clothes.

The Emperor orders a “Taj Mahal”
I prepared to conquer India with two set of resources. One, my crown jewels- a group of passionate start-up staff, with commando mindset from Day Zero. And second, an “insourced” General, CEO of our partner technology services company I had come to trust blindly over the years. The former created an eleven-page Requirements & Specifications document with process flows for TracHire which the latter started to develop. Under the contract, the vendor would develop the software on its proprietary .NET platform and providing hosting, administration and support services. While we had visualized the process screen by screen, the real-market dynamics turned out to be different. We did trail-and-error in the marketplace, in real time and this reflected in constantly changing specifications and moving targets.

TracHire, as initially envisaged, was to monitor a candidate from the time he contacted us with an Enquiry, was Registered, Assessed, Selected and Enrolled (ERASE). The candidate would then train in one of our four regional training academies before being evaluated by the Employer and placed.

We had got the customer need and process right. We also got the assessments right with our multi-attribute online diagnostic test called NEST (National Employability Skills Test), which was a huge differentiator. We were able to benchmark every candidate with his cohort in the same class, university or country. We could also benchmark the candidate with Employer’s “required” scores on the same attributes creating a neat pre-and-post assessment. But that’s where the list of Rights ended.

On hindsight, TracHire was our Taj Mahal. We learnt several key lessons building this ivory tower:

• Put the horse before the cart: Without a Product Development Head, our ivory tower was built because we had Blind lead the Blind and I personally wore opaque blinkers. We did not have an established business model, processes and requirements. Writing specifications for a business model which kept changing turned out to be our waterloo.
• Caveat Emptor or Let the Buyer Beware: We quickly bought “Rapid Application Development” using our vendor’s proprietary BPM (business process management) engine on .NET, assured that it will take a fraction of time and cost. A complete TracHire was elusive till the end.
• Diversify Risk: We decided to outsource development, hosting, administration, support and maintenance to one Firm to make it attractive for him to serve us. Despite being a management accountant, I forgot the basics of audit and we put all our eggs in one basket.
• Start Small, Think Big: As we had customers, we decided to do a big-bang All-India launch, doing no pilots and started on Day 1 with our “Talent Scouts” in over ten cities. We did too much trial-and-error and re-writing of processes as we learnt on-the-job which was expensive and fatal.
• If it’s too good to be true, it’s not true: One of our TracHire USPs was meant to be a Voice & Accent Testing tool, which nobody in India had built till date. Few international products like Versant are very expensive. Our vendor convinced us that he could build the product. Phew!
• Keep it simple; do not over-engineer: Several of our features like Video CVs, Online scheduling of assessments, Weekly candidate progress report inside Training Academies, etc. were never used by our customers or our own staff, who preferred Excel spreadsheets. In six months, we had 20 pages of over-engineered specifications, never to be used in real life. Ignorance is bliss.

Aspire ran into rough weather with the 2008 recession and with layoffs common, recruitment was passé. We changed our business model on its head to serve the Educators as the prime customer; not the Employers. Aspire 2.0 was born by December 2008. Suddenly, “TracHire” appeared redundant.

A Royal Cat with Nine Lives OR Old Wine in New Bottle
Aspire 2.0 resurrected Aspire and an unlikely “TracHire” turned out to be a royal cat with nine lives. We created two versions of TracHire- Business Edition and University Edition with eight (and later six) modules in each. Our assessment module and especially “NEST” continued to be a big hit. It served us well during the two years of Aspire 2.0 from 2009-2011. We delivered about 100,000 assessments over this period (sometimes offline during bulk testing).

However, the recession caught up with our vendor as well who went through a rough time during this period. He missed deadlines and promises. Despite challenges, he did his best and did not eject. We too evaluated through independent audits and dropped options to change vendor due to our long history. We worked with our vendor till “TracHire” died in 2010, three years after it had started, not before an eloquent swan song.

TracHire was clearly a bridge between Aspire 1.0 and 2.0, helping us secure Educators as customers by using the ERASE process for student marketing, student enrollments and fee management. Infact, we ended up selling several modules of TracHire University Edition. Our core business grew from ~2800 students in 2008-09 to ~12,700 students in 2009-10 and ~25,000 students in 2010-11 while customers grew from 18 in 2008-09 and 2009-10 to 40 in 2010-11. TracHire supported the growth despite bugs and deficiencies. Until a 2010 accident, when we lost student data to be used for their final assessments. Murphy’s law came true: To err is human, but to really mess up, you need technology. With nowhere to hide, since then, TracHire Rests In Peace.

Today, Aspire is a growing start-up as an Embedded Employabilty Education firm. NeoHire is long gone. All new Aspire products have Global Certifications: ProHire and EnglishPro with University of Cambridge (ESOL Examinations); ITPro and RoboticPro with iCarnegie (subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University); and, MBAPro with Harvard Business Publishing (subsidiary of Harvard Business School). Our products are still enabled by technology: our new Employability Education Management System (EEMS) which includes online learning management, elearning and assessments (e.g., NEST). Perhaps, old wine in new bottle. The decision to move to a US-headquartered, professional, Learning Management System (LMS) was made after evaluation of all opensource and proprietary platforms. We involved two former CTOs from IBM and SAP in making this decision as well as our Bangalore-based consultant. Our new COO, Alok Jain (formerly VP-Training at Wipro) led the decision. The best thing I did was not to interfere.

Despite our roller-coaster ride, the customers never experienced the weaknesses of our software. People processes more than made up. Our Student Satisfaction Ratings were 3.5 on 1-4 scale both in 2009-10 and 2010-11. On the same scale, our Customer Satisfaction Ratings grew from 2.8 to 3.2 over the same period. Aspire was declared “Education Czar” by Mint (2008), adjudged finalist of the John P. McNulty prize (2010), and profiled as “Who’s Next” by Fast Company (USA, 2011). I owe it to our founding team members who with commando-styled brute force overcame technology and business challenges, despite a blindfolded CEO. Thanks to them, NEST and good luck, Aspire continues to enable Educators, Employers and Employees to Grow More.

As we were growing, some of the problems we faced in our small enterprise were to do with email clutter slowing down our system, wasting a lot of time hunting for information, basic communication challenges at work where the output was sometimes not as expected, timesheet problems and to many revision files hanging around, to name a few. It was frustrating to land into crises situations with clients that too on weekends or holidays because of some wrong information sharing or lack of communication that had nothing to do with our technical capabilities at work.

With all this chaos going on in my office, I just sat one day researching for the right enterprise solution that would save us from all the trouble, but really nothing was available for a small firm like mine. This is really the story behind the evolution of our brand TaskTrek. I put all my forces behind the designing and developing of TaskTrek for managing office communication and information management. It was a tough decision we took compromising new business but a wise one, so that it not only benefits us but many other SMEs with same problems we faced.

We have been using TaskTrek with our clients for the last two years and it has helped us immensely. My team is far more focused, there is better accountability, and most importantly I have my team communicating seamlessly on work related matters with clients and internally. Investing in TaskTrek, has given us an edge over others as we are better informed and work in collaboration that wins us more business from our clients, also on the look of it more professional. Most of our internal issues were resolved when TaskTrek was put in place and now we are helping other SMEs across businesses to get organized by allowing customizations in TaskTrek that fits into their business, their way.

I’ll be wrong if I say that there are limited enterprise solutions available today but really nothing to fit into our small business. Talking of TaskTrek as a technology that helped our business grow and save us from crises, we have truly gained a competitive edge not only in terms of our clients but cost and innovation. One, it is available to SMEs at a cost they can easily afford. You don’t have to really think twice about getting it or not irrespective how small you are as a company. TaskTrek costs only Rs. 100 per employee per month to organize all information and communication in one place.

The other important thing about SMEs is their loosely defined hierarchy structure or informal way of working with continuous resource sharing for optimizing manpower. In scenarios like these, it is really not easy to replicate actual working online or automation through technology. TaskTrek can fit into all organization structures with a flexible hierarchy function so that it’s easy to map your team online and collaborate seamlessly with them.

In today’s fast changing environment, where most of companies allow their employees working from home internet is really the key. You need to be connected always and be able to work from where ever you are. So, why not put all your work online and collaborate with team and clients on online. That’s really the point I’m trying to make. Without any dependencies, you should be able to access your information from your client’s office or wherever you are. As a manager, be on top of all information and communication that your subordinates are exchanging amongst themselves or external. In crises or any which ways, you should be able to seamlessly communicate on work related matters, delegate team to work or the other way round, and efficiently run your business without having to worry about nitty-gritty matters. If you can adopt technology that lets you do all this more, then what is really stopping you? TaskTrek has given empowered us to do more that we really could wonder. It is fast, and really easy with abundant features to get us going smoothly.

Our TaskTrek service for SMEs is secure. All data rests on our private servers with regular maintenance and backups. So, needless to worry about cloud, or security of your data or confidentiality contracts signed with your clients’ when you signup an agreement with us for use of TaskTrek. SMEs don’t have to invest hugely into IT infrastructure or team or multiple softwares to man their business. That’s another plus point.

Talking of my enterprise, the team is small here but large enough to manage all the business we are getting. In my small team, we have divided all our work into projects and tasks (or sub-projects) and allocated resources on each of them with clients on board. So, communication becomes really easy with the sharing function of TaskTrek. All messages appear in a trail like format. As a manager, I can view all messages my teams are sharing between themselves and clients without having to ask them individually. I have a report of all messages going out to external email IDs and all responses to the messages get integrated with internal messages seamlessly under the activities or tasks. So, if I have to get an activity report on some work, I can easily pull out all the communication and information related to it in fraction of seconds.

All our project information or data is also well organized under projects and tasks. It is easy to email files, discuss files, share heavy files and attach files to messages using TaskTrek. There by, integrating all communication and information in one place.

Not only this, as a manager, I can access my team calendars, manage my projects and keep a tab on activity or team performance through customized reports that are in built into our TaskTrek account.

Adopting TaskTrek technology, there is really no loss of information or outdated information being used.

As an entrepreneur, and as a technologist, I truly believe that TaskTrek is a state-of-the-art technology for SMEs not because it is our business proposition but because it has evolved after thorough research and addresses to a need gap for a easy to maintain and use solution that is affordable and fit to all organizations where managing communication and information from one place is the key. There is no need for multiple softwares or solutions the TaskTrek way. It threads together functions of communication management, document management, resource management and project management into a robust collaboration tool.

In our country, people are still fearful to use technology to their benefit. The truth is that most of us are still on social media, using tabs and blackberry’s etc. As long as technology is easy to use and implement there is nothing to fear. TaskTrek has a very user friendly interface and simple to use. Our training sessions for TaskTrek to SMEs are more about how to address the basic challenges at work and change of mindset than about technical training of TaskTrek. There is no need for technical training.

As you plan to start up your business, and lay out a budget for it do make technology an intrinsic part of your plan to get you a smooth sailing throughout. Choosing the right technology comes only by actually trying it out to see what will work best for you. TaskTrek has helped us meet day to day challenges at work; similarly, you need be cognizant of your problems at workplace and then be open to solutions to counter them. We understand it is not easy from running a small to a mid-sized company; therefore like I stated right at the start of my piece, at every stage of your business there is a need to get organized and work smarter by optimizing talent & technology.

For CL Educate Ltd. (formerly known as Career Launcher India Ltd.) technology has always been at the forefront of everything we do. Back in 1995 when a bunch of us started this company we had only 500 students. It was in our early days itself that we decided to take the bold step of developing our ERP and this was in a time when ERP was very new to the industry and most of the companies were yet to adopt it. With the use of IT enabled solutions CL was able to scale very quickly from a 500 student start-up to a organization which has 60,000 students studying with it. Technology has helped us to scale the business fast and efficiently. We work in a franchisee model wherein most of our centers are managed by our business partners. Because we have the technology to support our business CL has become the preferred partners for many investors which is why CL learning centers are now 225 in number.

For an organization that is spread across 175 cities in the country with over 225 learning centers and total manpower of more than 3000, technology keeps us connected and organized and ensures that all our systems are in place. An organization that has IIT-IIM alumni at its helm, CL Educate has always been on the forefront of employing technology across various functions for superior, boundary-less educational services. As a technology-driven organization, we have implemented advanced ERP, e-CRM, advanced ERP solutions for managing our diverse operations, employee portals and sophisticated Student Information Systems.

Satellite technology and the Internet has played a vital role in bridging the distance barrier between us and our consumers, who are geographically dispersed. Latest technology is revolutionizing the education market and creating possibilities of taking education to the home of the student via the Internet . With technologies like Voice or Video over IP (VOIP) CL students in remote locations are now experiencing the benefits of participating in live classroom sessions from their homes or from a cybercafe. The best faculty on any topic can make available the recordings of their sessions, which can be downloaded and heard at any time of the day. VOIP allows for two-way video and voice, allowing hundreds of individual students to participate and learn together from the very best faculty on the subject.

VSAT has allowed classes to be broadcast from a single central studio and be simultaneously received at multiple locations. Most of our centers are VSAT enabled with a two-way audio exchange. Thus through our etutoring platform we have the capability to teach thousands of students together.

CL’s technology team has deployed in-house productivity and learning tools built on the latest technologies across all its centers. Integrated internet tools like Student Information System (SIS) is used daily by over 10,000 students and 200 faculty. The CL SIS is a unique messaging and performance tracking system for students and faculty to interact with each other and exchange information. The performance tracking system keeps a record of every classroom or online test taken by the student. A sophisticated analysis of the test results informs a student about his or her strengths and weaknesses, provides comparative benchmarks and inputs on test taking strategies.

A host of cutting edge technologies are being used to provide the best content to our students in a timely manner. CL offers a range of products that helps students to stay ahead in the competition & gives them the freedom to pick whatever they need through our online products like MBA-On-Demand which is a series of concept building interactive webinars. Our Online Enrollment System is a web based system for students to browse classroom locations and select courses and enroll by paying their fees using a credit card. One of the most important postgraduate entrance exams in the country, the CAT, became a computer based test in the year 2009 and this meant that students had to be prepared and mentored keeping in mind their relative unease with the online medium. CL launched a range of online Test Prep programs like MBA-on-Demand, Test Gym, CAT Scan, Test Series and the like. Students can now learn, practise and test, online. CL was also among the first to conduct a glitch-free Proctored Mock CAT in the same year when Prometric’s first computer based CAT was marred by problems and technological issues. In an industry where technology is fast taking over all processes, CL has always kept pace and risen to the challenge by adapting its methods and pedagogy according to the market demand.

CL enables its content development team with an advanced workflow management system for managing the entire content development effort involving over 100 authors, editors, language experts, proof readers, and quality assurance team members. The workflow system also serves as content repository and is capable of handling various document formats including images, XML, HTML, Pagemaker and Corel files.  CL content authors use the latest authoring tools to build electronic repositories of question banks and lessons.

Business Process Automation has streamlined the way we run our day to day business. Besides reducing the total number of manpower required to run a business and reduction in paperwork, the cost for intra communication has reduced significantly with the integration of all our employees on a common platform like CLMS –a common messaging system,FIS –for center imprests, personal claims and a robust request system. ERP V 5.1 an integrated solution developed in-house helps CL maintain information about students, courses, pricing, payment collection, scheduling of classes, and customer inquiries. The front-end applications have been developed in Java Swing with Oracle 8i as the database, the ERP uses advanced database replication methods to organize nationwide customer data. Our CRM system gives real time access to our customers data which in turn helps our sales and marketing team in their productivity.

From a start-up with 500 students to a well-diversified edu-corporate with over 60,000 students every year, CL Educate has come a long way and much of it can be attributed to its technology focus. As its network grew across the country, CL Educate was able to maintain the same quality of educational services and customer experience everywhere owing to its technology focus. With all of its operations and processes well in place, we could focus on our core purpose of helping students achieve their career goals. We have been able to attract the best employees and business partners in the industry who have benefited from our online systems and processes and have been able to focus solely on the best student experience.

In the 21st century, where an eight hour job expects you to deliver exponential results, the significance of technology in the basic realms of business can’t go unnoticed.

Technological evolution has brought us closer, quickened communication, and encouraged innovation. Entrepreneurs today need to align themselves to this exciting tech-savvy environment, so that they can utilize it effectively.

During the 15-year journey of Mother’s Pride, we have seen impressive technological advancements in the education industry. To meet the competition and come out as winners, Mother’s Pride has always adopted the latest technological methods be it in teaching, administration or infrastructure which has further enhanced our brand’s image.

Mother’s Pride and Presidium have developed world-class infrastructure with smart boards and interactive boards. We also introduced school management system for effective parent-school communication. The administration department manage their key tasks through software rather than manual handling, leading to higher productivity. One of our recent initiatives was the development of the Kid’s Gallery, an online bank for a child’s photographs clicked at various events in the school. Easy to access, Kid’s Gallery serves as a reservoir of memories for parents. Harnessing technology in these ways has helped us come closer to the parents.

Creating a Tech-savvy Modern Education System
Technology has influenced education. Sometimes, the association has been controversial, but there is no denying its powerful impact on the way we teach. Online resources have made the learning process much faster, and made parent-teacher and student-teacher communication effective. A profound impact of technology can be seen in creating a time-savvy and high efficiency environment even in the education system.

The Internet, in particular, has equipped students with instant research tools, opening up new horizons for them.

Tech-savvy leads to Cost-savvy
Modern day education has embraced technology well, providing readily accessible teaching and communication tools such as e-learning, online curriculum, smart boards, online results, e-books, school management system, kids’ gallery etc.

These methods have led to significant cost-reduction by saving the revenue spent on text books and other print communications. It has also led to time-optimization, as the mode of interaction is faster and more approachable. Not only this, the businesses have experienced an increase in customer satisfaction level after adopting a tech friendly approach.

Getting the edge
In an ever-growing competitive environment, a technologically driven organization or entrepreneur stands out. The education sector strongly believes that holistic develoment is the key to overall learning. We also need to understand that emotional strengthening is an essential part of effective teaching.

Technology: “A Problem Solver’
Technology is a powerful hurdle-buster. In my personal experience, it has greatly helped to reduce the communication gaps between the school and the parents, creating an effective customer experience.

Through adoption of online communication methods i.e. circulating emails or updating websites, the time dependency is greatly reduced, making our parents satisfied.

Our Key Initiatives

Although technology is a powerful learning tool, it can be deceptive sometimes. Sure, it can be used to inform, but also to distort. It can boldly open new doors, while flinging open some that were perhaps best left closed. Thus, it is important to be tech-savvy without being a tech-addict, and to utilize its benefits to help, not harm.

1. Call center backend.
2. Logistics Software.

What does Tastykhana do:

We provide online food ordering and delivery logistics solutions to restaurants across Pune, we handle the entire delivery process which involves

a. Taking orders from customers – phone, online, or mobile

b. Sending orders to the restaurant.

c. Providing the logistics to deliver the order to customer.

Challenges faced and how technology has helped

Call center:
Since this is a very niche segment, employing the right people for the job was a difficult task. We needed people who not only had good verbal communication skills, but also had good food knowledge..

To overcome the problem of finding people with both skill sets, we decided to build an intelligent customer ordering system that assisted the customer care representative to process customer orders quickly even if they did not have food knowledge.

The system included the following features

Customer profiles:

1. 1. Easy retrieval of customers profile using a mobile number
   2. Store multiple addresses for each customer to avoid having to re-type the address
   3. Customer order history since many customers want to repeat past orders
   4. Customer location-based searching of restaurant, cuisine, delivery options, etc.

Restaurant Menu:

This is one of the most comprehensive and detailed part of the system. To make it easy for customer care representatives to recommend an item we have categorized each food item by:

1. Preparation style (Thick gravy, semi gravy, dry etc)
2. Color (green, brown, red, white etc)
3. Spice level (spicy, medium spicy, sweet etc)
4. Availability of item (restaurants prepare certain items at specific times, so system alerts the executive if the item is available at this time or not)

Other menu related features include:

1. 1. Linking of menu items to both the Indian as well as English versions. So search for an item like Tandoori Chicken or Murgh Tandoori returns the same result
   2. Most popular menu items for a particular restaurant based on past orders which is used to upsell to customers who are ordering from a particular restaurant for the first time
   3. which.

Online order process:

1. 1. 1. Push notification system in place to alert our customer care representatives about a lead.
      2. Automated order assignments combined with availability to ensure balanced distribution across customer care representative.
      3. Intelligent rules engine that uses customer profile to automate the order placement directly to the restaurant without any human involvement

Restaurant order process:

1. Configurable order transmission technology options based on restaurant characteristics
   1. Email for restuarants using Blackberry
   2. SMS for restaurants using mobiles
   3. Real-time order dashboard with instant order print for restaurants using computer terminals
   4. Telephone ordering, when no other technology options are viable or reliable

Delivery Logistics:

1. Auto assign algorithm
2. SMS alert system for delivery boys

Some of the major issues we face for delivery logistics are the manual processes involved such as:

1. Selecting a boy to deliver the order.
2. Giving the delivery address to boy on phone.
3. Making multiple calls to multiple delivery boys to find out status of their orders.
4. Maintaining Food Delivery Representatives shifts.

We needed to automate a significant portion of this process to make it efficient and scalable..

Solution:
We introduced detailed mapping software in our system which divides a city into multiple zones and each zone then has road level mapping. Then each zone is also associated to their nearest neighboring zones..

Food Delivery Representatives are associated to a zone where they will operate from. The system maintains scheduling details for Food Delivery Representatives to ensure accurate order assignment process based on their working schedule.(solves point 4)

To solve points 1 and 2 we created an algorithm that helped pick up the most optimal resource for the delivery of the order based on:

1. Which zone is the order originating from
2. Which zone does the order need to be delivered to.
3. How long will the order take to prepare (Again based on the order amount).

We then created an automated order notification process for our Food Delivery Representatives

To enhance the customer experience, we also created an order tracking process so that the customer is aware of his real time order status – Placed – Prepared – In route orDelivered..

Similarly, our Food Delivery Representatives also interact with our server through SMS to tell their real time status – On the Way to the Restaurant, Picked Up Parcel or Order Delivered. Only in case of SMS returning the status as ‘Issue, please call’ do our delivery managers call the concerned representative. This innovative technology has saved our company huge time, effort and money w.r.t. thousands of calls every month.

We hadn’t bargained for the fact that education is a social activity which occurs in the human context. Subsequent events were to prove that technology was to have a critical role in education but it had to be balanced with the supremacy of face to face teaching. Just as important as it is to understand the value added through technology, it is critically important to understand the context and the specific problem being solved through the application of technology. The key is to be able to forecast adoption trends for new technologies as its just easy to over design technology just as it is to become obsolete.

Education has been one of the lagging sectors of society in adopting technology; Change has been hard to drive in institutions of learning. It is extremely important to understand and harness the factors that drive institutional change. It provides as much competitive advantage to a company as does access to cutting edge technology.

Now, that education is getting fundamentally reshaped through technology, it is heartening to note a number of attempts to innovate issues related to instruction, delivery, assessment, pedagogy and community. Each aspect of education right from pre Kindergarden to Adult learning is being impacted by technology driven innovation. Educators are also coming out and boldly experimenting with newer ways of teaching, of testing and of fostering a sense of collaboration.

Product design in the last few years for us in education, has been at the intersection of hardware and software. The interactive software which goes along with the Interactive Board , the personalization platforms that we are now building around tablets. Our experience has been that such hybrid solutions are better accepted in the market.

If we try to look back at our journey, the technology edge has always attracted the innovative early adopter customers towards us. It has also allowed us to have a standardized quality edge. It has further permitted us to attract and retain employees who have been driven by the urge to create and innovate. The excitement of our product designers and engineers towards building the curriculum of the future has kept us going through our tough days.

One of the possibilities of technology which excites us today is to be able to personalize delivery to the aptitude and skills of each child. While the technology for this is not perfect, the challenge to create a pragmatic solution which is able to motivate each learner towards his potential is enormous. The challenge is to engage the minds of a new generation of learners who are digital natives and who are immersed in technology from their birth. The learning solutions for such learners would be based on a paradigm shift in curriculum goals and ways of collaboration.

It is heartening to see the same excitement at classteacher. The dream to build a brave new world of education, teaching and learning. To inspire a new generation of teachers to engage their students. While technology is a great edge to build a business, it is no substitute for good old dreaming.

At RC&M, we provide one to one marketing and channel outreach solutions. Our pan India network stretches across 5000 towns, 4 lakh villages and 7 metros.Nearly 100 per cent of urban, 75 per cent of semi-urban and 70 per cent of rural India have seen at least one idea being implemented by RC&M.

It is obvious then, that our biggest challenge is to be with our on-ground team that conducts activations, pan India through a system that lets us keep track of our 200 communication units, 24×7. We needed a technology integration where every action at every location in every town or village could be captured and updated to us in real time. Our sister concern Truknox technology developed the RAP (RC&M Analytical Portal) to do just that.

The RAP captures data- client name, name of market, project objective, customer impressions, leads generated, ratio of leads to conversions and photographs of the activity. This data is routed through SMS, GPS or internet. The GPS enabled communication vehicles enable authenticity of location, entry-exit time and mapping, location mapping and activity schedule.

With access to this data we are in total control of the on-ground situation anywhere in India. This is because the data captured in real time gives us enough time to understand the problem on the field and take a decision immediately. These precious bites from the field keep us alert and aware at all times. It also boosts our morale to know that we can fix a problem in 200 corners of India sitting at our desk.

Other than the problem I stated at the beginning of this article, there are innumerable issues we have faced and overcome through this technology. For example, if a project takes a pause due to break-down of communication tools or vehicles, a flash alert automatically routes itself to the respective department. The department, in this case can immediately take a call on what to do next. There have also been cases when the technology helped up to deliver as per the designed schedule so that we execute our entire campaign flawlessly.

As far as the future goes, I personally feel the RAP will be greatly enhanced as we continue our effort to perfect work through technology. I certainly believe there is scope for interactivity in the RAP, thereby, making it a priceless tool. Technological integration will eventually go far beyond just the RAP for us. We will find ways to bridge the gaps still remaining. Time will vindicate our efforts to keep control and monitor any activity anywhere in India in such a way that everyone on both sides of the fence will be proud of it.