Brick-n-mortar going click-n-mortar in India

PUNE: Some of them had and still have the ‘expense’ mindset when it comes to investing in IT, unlike their international counterparts, who treat IT as an ‘investment’ overseas. But the willingness to spend is slowly but steadily drilling down here, says an upbeat Balaji Sreenivasan, CEO, Aurigo software, specialists in the construction ERP domain.

“As the young generation comes at the helm of affairs and competition rises, lot of companies in construction space etc in India would be replacing home-grown ERPs with better automated systems.” He explains.

The company that last year launched its India operations, an addition to US and Middle East markets, bagged ten customers in 12 months and sees the number trebling this year with a strong pipeline already there.

Sreenivasan is sure that there is huge potential in the Indian market and Indian business outlook, at around 150 per cent year-on-year is the strongest amongst other regions so far. “Infrastructure sector is booming and that would be followed by business adoption in ERPs too. As these solutions give controls in areas like cost, wastage and time of completion which, in the range of three to five per cent is significant savings for a company spending thousands of crores of typical money in a project today.”

Customer segments span across owners, government agencies, project management companies, contractors, realtors etc and going ahead Aurigo plans to cement its foothold in adjacent verticals like ship-building, interior- design, power plants etc that have mostly similar needs as a construction vertical company.

So far companies like Nagarjuna Construction Company, a Project company from Delhi, Naveen Housing from Chennai, SMC Corporation etc have deployed these solutions.

Aurigo says it makes a typical ERP platform ready for the construction vertical by adding processes like scheduling, field management, contract management, tenders, automation, inspection etc to the standard core process automation of HR, finance, material etc that a core ERP covers. It is basically integrated with Microsoft Dynamics but says the solutions are ERP agnostic.

“Our products are company-neutral and can integrate with other ERP platforms like SAP or Oracle too, and then working seamlessly. The basic gap around ERP readiness for specific requirements of this vertical is what we exactly address.” He says.

Expense or investment can be left to be best judged by customers only. Commenting on the total wallet impact for a solution, he tells that the money part ranges from Rs25 lakhs for a small customer to Rs four to five crores for a large enterprise. “The product is license-modeled and one license costs about Rs one-and-a-half lakh with the product-to-user ratio of about 1:3. In addition to that typical implementation cost would be around 12 to 30 lakhs while training entails Rsone lakh.

“Aurigo provides web based solutions for the Architecture, Engineering and construction Industry verticals worldwide. Our software product suite BRIX automates the processes of project cost estimation, electronic bidding (tendering), contract management and field inspections. Our customers include state and local government agencies, large construction management firms, general contractors, transit authorities, power plant contractors, ship building & repair companies and real estate developers worldwide.” He added.

He was speaking with CyberMedia News after a conference announcing the launch of an ERP lab which would address the training and skilled manpower requirement that customers have when they buy products in this domain.

Aurigo announced that it is providing software support to NICMAR in collaboration with Microsoft. Aurigo and Microsoft will provide NICMAR with free licenses of BRIX 2009, Aurigo’s web-based construction management and inspection software, and free licenses of Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP software under their respective academic alliance programs. As part of this endeavor, Aurigo and Microsoft will assist NICMAR in setting up India’s first ever Construction ERP Lab across their centers in Pune, Hyderabad and Goa.