Treating customisation in hospital ERPs

PUNE, INDIA: Product Vs services dosage, developer-independent approach and 80 per cent generic prescriptions is the new way of attacking customisation that is being tried out at DesignTech Systems Limited, a Product Lifecycle Management, engineering design firm and healthcare solution provider that has been de­livering its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution to hospitals across India.

As it turns out the company recognises the need for customisation by enterprises in Indian healthcare domain but it is attempting to address it in a different manner.

Abhijit Sane, business manager, Healthcare domain, DesignTech Systems Ltd says, “Our offering is of a product flavour and not based on services unlike other players. That gives us much less dependency on developers as we base it on one source code.”

So while it caters to lot of customisation requests by its customers, it does so in configurations and not with actual developer armies sitting and working on it.

The reason being that the latter approach which is normally taken by competitors, results in end number of versions for end number of customers. “What is the developer leaves. The customer could be left high and dry. Hence we work on a basic code and that's possible because our offering is uniquely designed as a product.”

He mentions medical records as a major area of customization in Indian healthcare enterprises. More, so because the format changes from hospital to hospital and consultant to consultant.

“Äbout 80 per cent of generic requirements are catered to in the basic design. Rest is taken care as and when we approach and interact with a customer as per his working rule,” he adds.