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ERP solutions for infrastructure industry

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CIOL Bureau
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Balaji SreenivasanBalaji Sreenivasan, CEO and founder, Aurigo, talks to Sudhakaran and V.Sudhakshina of CyberMedia News about the solutions that Aurigo offers to the industry to help it increase efficiency and productivity in an organized manner. Excerpts:

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Could you please give a brief outline about Aurigo, and the ERP solutions that it provides to the infrastructure and construction and real estate industry?

Well, just to give you a quick background, Aurigo is a software product company focused on construction and real estate. When you you ask me, if we provide ERP solutions - the answer is yes and no. The product is an industry add-on for ERP platforms like Microsoft Dynamics AX, where the combination of our product, which is BRIX 2009, and Microsoft Dynamics, combine to deliver a powerful industry-specific ERP.

Let me take a few steps back and tell you a little bit about what ERP typically does and why our product is a value add. ERP, as a platform, automates the four M's of any business - Men, Machines, Material and Money.

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And over the last five or six years, as industries have become more mature, companies and enterprises have been demanding more unique solutions to meet their processes. And with that, the advent of industry-specific ERP solutions.

So what Microsoft has done to address the specific needs of Industry segments is to partner with select ISVs (like Aurigo) worldwide, each of which has a specialization in a specific industry vertical – like retail, construction, or manufacturing – to provide compelling, complete solutions to the end customer.

For construction, we actually automate every piece of estimation, contract management, project management, and field inspection, including managing land banks and integrate with GIS and mapping. This solution of ours, BRIX 2009, works seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics AX, which is Microsoft's ERP platform to provide a complete industry ready ERP solution.

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How do these solutions help these sectors from a financial perspective?

Control costs! Basically we are in a tough market right now and every construction house, thanks to the recession, is becoming more mature and more competitive. These down trends in markets typically make organizations more mature and handle their finances with utmost care as opposed to a market where money is easy to find.

I think, managing their costs, keeping a check on their expenses, and managing their profitability is even more important now than ever before. What BRIX 2009 basically does is help them control their project costs right from the word "get-go" up until completion.

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It sounds interesting for a start up to focus on the disorganized infrastructure sector, what was it that made you select it?

It was the disorganized attitude of the construction sector what actually spelt opportunity for automation. And that was the very obvious reason why any business would actually want to build solutions to automate an industry's need.

We started off the company as building mobile middle-ware stack, addressing field workers and enabling them to collect data in the field and automate their field processes, eliminating paper.

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Roundabout in 2004, we decided to verticalize and address one single vertical, because the company size that we were as a start up, it did not make sense to have a generic solution across all verticals.

So when we look at construction, it met both these needs. A majority of the construction workforce is located offsite, in the field... and that was an ideal leverage of our technology, which stemmed from mobile middleware. Even today the key piece of our product is the mobile inspector, who collects data in the field and records the work progress made on site using a digital PDA , camera, or a laptop vis-à-vis a paper clip board.

Then, if you look at the construction industry as such, there are some very large companies like Autodesk, Catia, or Solidworks that provide design modeling tools to architects to design these large building or physical assets. Right after they finish that design, the product to automate the construction and estimation of that physical asset does not exist.

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So, the combination of our prowess in mobile technology plus the disorganized construction management processes available in the market was the reason we addressed this space.

Do you provide any custom-made solutions?

Yes. While we are not a pure services company, we provide services around our products. We have a product, BRIX 2009, meant for construction and real estate. Every organization has a set of different needs, different set of work flows, a different set of reporting requirements, different set of forms that they used to collect data, where their organizations has been set up.

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Our products might not meet these needs just out of the box, the way they want it. There is about 15 to 20 per cent of effort required to customize and configure it for specific needs. Our solutions team provides customization and business consulting services to bridge these gaps.

And how did the partnership with Microsoft and NICMAR help the company in its innovations?

They have been extremely critical to our success. They are two different partnerships and two types of partnership. Microsoft is more a technology and go-to-market partner, so our products are based on Microsoft technologies which is .Net, Sequel 2005, and supports and runs on Windows operating system.

In 2006, when we were looking at scale, we were a moderately successful construction management software product and we said how to scale the company from here - there were two roads ahead of us, one is to actually build out our product and address every ERP need of a construction house – of accounting, sales, HR, finance, marketing etc.

And the other was to partner with a tier-A ERP provider like Microsoft which did all of this and compliment their offering. So we struck a strategic alliance with Microsoft in the year 2006, where they have co funded building of connectors between our BRIX 2009 and their ERP platform.

And our go-to-market approach is that we have an industry add-on called BRIX, Microsoft has a powerful ERP platform, and the combination delivers a very rich experience which is industry ready for construction houses.

NICMAR was a relationship that also started round about 2005-2006. We were a successful product company in the US selling to counties, public works departments and cities, and when we decided an India story, and to enter in to Asia-India markets, we needed to localize our products for India geography.

And the first institute that came to our mind was NICMAR, National Institute of Construction Management and Research. They are a leading academic body started by the Government of India. Started a couple of decades back, based in Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad, and they focus on construction management and the best prices therein

It was natural for us to contact them and ask for their support and advice in analyzing our US product and helping us make it ready for the Indian market and also localizing it. So we struck a product relationship with them and they still continue to be our product advisory team.

Since realty is a major sector where the impact of economic recession is clearly visible. Do you see a challenging time ahead for you?

The markets overall have been hit very badly – it doesn't matter which vertical segments you are in... I think all markets today are in a cash and liquidity crunch situation.

When you say infrastructure and realty, they are two very different verticals and we address both. Infrastructure is one that deals with roads, highways and bridges, while real estate segment deals with villas, apartments, residential townships, hospitality units etc.

What we have found is that the government spends on the infrastructure sector during the time of recession is actually on the increase. If you look at the recent $825 billion stimulus package by President Barack Obama, a good portion of it is towards roads and highways and bridges. If you look at the Government of India spending right now, the government has called for more expenditure on building infrastructure and roads. Because these are the investments made by governments that put the economy back on track.

We actually see a sustained growth in construction and infrastructure. As far as real estate is concerned, yes companies are more wary right now. They don't have apartments that have been sold as regularly as before and so the cash flow doesn't exist.

But what is happening there is amongst the more mature players, they are seeing this as a time to consolidate, to streamline their processes, and get more competitive, because if they can control cost and streamline their processes they can offer better pricing and more competitive rates to end customers. So lot of mature real estate players are using this time to buy technology and automate their processes.

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