Our experts on our India team share their insights into solving your trickiest business and technology problems.
While helping find solutions to our clients’ toughest problems, we’ve learned a thing or two. In this series, we share insights from our India team of seasoned solvers on overcoming today’s business, technology, and people-related challenges.
People
Meet Your Problem Solver
Kanupriya Anand | Centric India PMO Lead and Program Manager | Delivery Excellence
PEOPLE PROBLEM
Business ecosystems are often dynamic and fast-paced, and strategic objectives shift with market trends. Organizations dealing with multiple global stakeholders and conflicting priorities frequently encounter communication gaps, collaboration challenges, and unmet expectations. In such an environment, even minor oversights can quickly escalate, impeding project progress and driving up costs.
OUR INSIGHT
In day-to-day interactions, everyone within a business must strive to establish and uphold trust and confidence with each other. But trust is earned, not received. Team members must first work to carefully understand the needs and expectations of key stakeholders on the project. Individuals and sub-teams can then responsibly steward the project by delivering quality products at every step. Of course, doing so requires a lot of team collaboration, hard work, and perseverance.
Along the way, regular and transparent updates for key stakeholders, timely callouts on risks and delays, appropriate recommendations on best practices and more efficient ways of working, and regular feedback for continuous improvements help to bridge the gaps. High-quality work, timely delivery, adherence to requirements, and meeting expectations help to build — and preserve — trust and confidence among project teams, preventing conflicts and errors that could negatively impact the organization and its projects.
Technology
Meet Your Problem Solver
Swapnil Hirve | Practice Director, Packaged Software for Centric India | Technology Capabilities
TECHNOLOGY PROBLEM
Businesses sometimes struggle to choose between different enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions because they are not sure the software will fit their unique business needs. They go to specific vendors who specialize in a particular ERP solution, attend presentations, and evaluate the solution’s fit. If they don’t feel the solution is suitable, they must start with a different vendor specializing in a different solution. This process not only requires a lot of time and expense, but it also can result in a less-than-perfect match.
OUR INSIGHT
Businesses that take this approach have usually skipped an essential step. ERP projects require an exhaustive discovery phase to document the current business processes. This often takes weeks, if not months, to perform, but it is essential to fully understand the business requirements for a new software implementation. Along the way, the process delivers a lot of documentation and insight into how the business operates.
While the discovery phase can account for more than a third of an ERP project’s lifecycle, in most cases, it is a necessary process and expense. The resulting documentation identifies gaps that can be placed into solution categories, like configuration, customization, future phase, or out-of-scope. Following discovery, a shorter solution design phase can then look more deeply at the gaps and identify the best ways to fill them.
With this hard work completed, businesses are better prepared to evaluate specific solutions. This approach saves time and money while reducing the risk that a new ERP will meet all business requirements while not causing disruption.
Business
Meet Your Problem Solver
Anirudh Kejriwal | Partner, Co-Lead | Centric India
BUSINESS PROBLEM
Businesses are constantly pressured to do more with less and to find skilled resources in a highly competitive environment. As a result, many of them want to turn to reliable offshore partners, but they hesitate because prior experiences with offshoring have been poor or they lack a trustworthy partner who can manage offshoring for them.
OUR INSIGHT
The right offshore partner can drive higher levels of performance and lower IT costs while eliminating worry about resource quality and continuity. However, businesses must do their due diligence before selecting an offshore partner. Someone within your organization should interview the prospective partner to ensure that they have the following qualities:
- A similar culture. Your offshore partner should align with your organization’s most important cultural attributes, such as transparency, ownership, accountability, and work style.
- A team that can function as an extension of your delivery team to provide scalability for skilled resources.
- A team made up of more experienced resources than less experienced resources, with high retention rates to ensure team continuity and stability.
- A dedicated US and offshore management team with extensive global delivery experience that can serve as a single point of contact for all your engagements.
Finding a partner with the above attributes will help take away the stress of offshoring and help both parties have a positive, productive experience.
In the end, your goal is to find an offshore partner who is committed to understanding your needs, using their expertise in various domains, technologies, and designs, and addressing your concerns with customized solutions that address your concerns so you will be better prepared for the future.
In only 10 months, we created a B2B app for easier ordering and customer data analysis in a global, data-driven industry.