MAIA holds discussion on ERP

NEW DELHI, INDIA: To empower SMB business nationwide MAIA Intelligence has rolled out the SMB offerings putting software services companies, ISVs and resellers in driver’s seat. The event was held on Nov 22 at Parle International. The focus of the event was to highlight the opportunities for channels with MAIA Intelligence BI Reporting offerings called 1KEY MIS Servers for SMB.

Vikram Kole, Head—Marketing, MAIA Intelligence at the event provided channels ample ammunition to exploit the opportunities with their existing customers and avenues to harness new revenue streams. The SMB segment uses applications like Tally, SAP B1, Microsoft Dynamics.

Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence then showcased the product offering of 1KEY MIS Servers live with on the fly usage and benefits of cubes view charts dashboard KPI and so on. Ashwin Dedhia, CA, Director Solutions, MAIA Intelligence and Tally Guru demonstrated connecting and extracting from such applications specially a closed database like Tally and making it available for reporting and analytics.

A panel discussion was held on ‘What Next After ERP’ moderated by Dedhia.

The panelist included Suketu Shah, CEO, Soham Computers from Ahmadabad; Vikram Seth, CEO, Software@Work; Hemant Nerurkar, MD, Mindcraft ; Janak Bhuta, CEO, Globalware Solutions from Pune and Mehta of MAIA Intelligence. IT leaders had gathered to discuss lot of insights to help companies move to next level after ERP.

The panel discussion started with a question asked by Dedhia to Shah. “Why do we need BI when already have ERP?”

Shah initiated the discussion by throwing light on the significance of BI. “I have been in ERP business since last 20 years with more than 500 plus customers in pharma ERP.

In an ERP, if required we can create 500 reports with whatever manpower needed, however the question is how the business user will maneuver across these 500 reports from given menu, which shall become too clumsy. On the contrary, with BI, 10 fields in one cube, maximum 550 reports can be generated with all permutations and combinations.

There are N-number of possibilities with multiple fields.  Plus all these reports are available with a ‘Do it yourself’ interface for a business user,” Shah shared when asked about his views about the challenges in development of custom reporting for each client on ERP.

While giving his views on Indian SMB business and whether they are computerized with accounting or ERP software, Seth of Software@Work said, “Yes, SMB businesses are more or less computerized. This seems like a situation where even SMB companies have created lot of data from their existing financial accounting, ERP and other process-based applications.  Now there is an evident need to unlock the value from this data and hence they are looking out for a reporting solution.”

Marking a clear distinction between ERP and BI, Nerurkar mentioned, “Both are different. ERP is a transactional application primarily meant for collecting data, and engineered to save data. Conversely, BI applications are engineered to retrieve data and data visualization. Having BI only will not generate data and having ERP only will not give actionable information.”

Commenting on whether ERP vendors or application vendors are locking the customer data and not making it available in democratic way, Nerurkar said that Vendors should not lock the data, but make it available so that customer can exploit their own data for further analytics.

The panel also discussed ways in which organizations and the solution providers can look at BI as a strategic move. “Existing customers are only giving us the AMCs, if I can bring in add-on which is complementing my product there are two benefits.

Satisfaction to the existing customer with more value from add-on and more revenue from the same customer. Finding new customer is always costly, so it is always advantageous to enhance the revenues from existing customers. So we thought of BI to generate new revenue stream and used 1KEY with our pharma suite ERP as a strategic move. Hence with BI, I have seen the benefits and there is lot of opportunity for me as an application vendor to foresee revenues,” added Shah.

Views were also sought from the speakers on whether BI was made for times like these (recession) and why it is gaining so much importance. It was reiterated that information must be treated like cash as its value diminishes as time goes by. Dedhia made a concluding note that Indian market in MIS for SMBs is growing, and he highlighted the opportunity for all, as application vendors, service providers and value-added resellers.