Accelerating Digital Transformation in the Energy & Utilities Sector – A Use Case

While most organizations in the Energy & Utilities industry have adopted digital, they still rely on disconnected transactional and operational systems. These systems might be efficient in handling simple transactional cycles but cannot manage the end-to-end process lifecycle.

The need of the hour is to leverage a unified system that connects documents, processes, people, and devices, and helps organizations create more sustainable business processes. This would help in increasing operational efficiency, reducing maintenance overheads, and helping become future-ready.

Join our esteemed panel of presenters as they share their experiences and insights on why accelerating digital transformation is now a top priority for E&U organizations.

Agenda:

• Key trends and drivers influencing digitization of processes and associated challenges in document engineering, engineering, management of documents.
• Use case demonstration
• Case studies/best practices/futuristic scenarios
• Q&A

Pranav Bhardwaj:             Very good day ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this webinar jointly hosted by Newgen and Wipro. Today we will be discussing the importance of digital solutions specifically around entering document management. And the criticality it entails for the energy and utilities industry. Documents and content have traditionally been and remained to be at the center of most processes we encounter in any organization. Documents store data and once they are made a part of the process, this data is turned into information. And it is then that it gets the relevant context that is added to it. This information is the critical element that helps in taking informed decisions that are faster, transparent and contains substantially lesser risk as every action is recorded and audited. Once we add up pleasant, intuitive, and easy to navigate user experience over these contextually flowing documents, what we get are highly effective digital journeys. Now these journeys extend across channels and provide all the relevance stakeholders with personalized messaging to keep them updated with the relevant information.

The pandemic has forced organizations globally to realign their digital transformation strategies, because it is no longer a matter of a want to have, but now it has transformed into a need to have and that also need to have now. To put more light on the importance of these journeys, we have to announce guests in our panel today. I would like to welcome Carlos and Vineet. Carlos has close to decades of experience helping and guiding customers on their path of digital discovery. He currently leads the alliances in Canada for Wipro. He has a very deep understanding of the energies and utilities industry and his insights in today’s discussion will help us better understand the challenges that the industry faces. He will also help establish a road map to transform the content that we were speaking about into more meaningful information that can flow through the organization and lock a lot of value that is trapped within them.

Vineet is a senior consultant with Newgen Software Technologies. And he has worked very closely with multiple energy and utility organizations globally. He heads our center of excellence for the ENU vertical and today he will take us through a walk through of a digital journey that is very relevant to this industry. Now, before I hand it over to our esteemed speakers, I would request all of you to not hold onto any of your questions, but type them on the chat window. Carlos and Vineet would try to answer most of these questions during discussion. However, if any of them are left unanswered, we promise to get back to you with the answers later on, on that note, I would request Carlos, to take on the stage and walk you through his thoughts on today’s topic. Carlos.

Carlos Santos:                    Sure, Pranav. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. And thank you to the Newgen team for inviting me here and giving me an excuse to wear a tie, it’s been quite a while. So we’ll be talking a little bit about becoming digital and specifically in engineering documents. One of the big themes we see in the market these days is certainly ecosystem digitization. I was recently reading analysis from one of the research houses and on the list of the most critical transformational initiatives was the increasing automation of businesses and processes and enabling a digital workspace. So today’s discussion is about this. And I will speak specifically in regards to document management and the efficiencies that are well implemented, comprehensive tool can bring to us in the engineering world. So I previously worked for companies involved with automation and electrical design, control rooms helps with substations, et cetera.

And they, of course, extensively used engineering documentation. And our role was sometimes to supply services or product directly to end users, other times PPCs. And of course we had our own equipment as well as equipment from their parties. So I’ll try to address most of what I say though, from the perspective of an owner. But I think that the challenges are pretty common and we can all relate. So forgive me if my perspective isn’t perfectly aligned, but I think it’ll be quite similar for many of us. And although I think these themes are pretty common across industries, I’m mainly drawing from context in the energy sector. So requirements obviously that are serious considerations for us like, regulatory requirements and safety are very important.

So first, a quick talk on some of the challenges we face. So the first I think that I mentioned is obviously the massive amounts of documents that are involved with modern projects from commercial proposal documents, contracts, change orders and all of that. Technical documents, product specs, drawings, revisions, versions, red lines, approvals, all of these things. Project documents, schedules, meeting minutes, organizational docs and a typical WBS has multiple submittals at various times. Submissions against milestones and then with approvals or rejections and consequential new efforts as a result of those. And of course there are peripheral requirements like invoicing that can also add complexity. A second category of challenge, I think is that the systems are complex and they can still be very dependent on manual intervention. So certainly project complexity is greater than it used to be. There are multiple stakeholders, EPCs, owners, vendors, integrators and often multiples of these. Timelines are short and of course delays are more expensive than they’ve ever been.

And a project we all know can have multiple rounds of approvals and sometimes many systems. This is done still through email. So even when automated, you might have SharePoint with vendor access, where vendors upload documents. This requires several transmittal documents to be sent to a document control person who then often has to take these documents and move them into an internal company SharePoint to manage there. So one example I’ll give that I’ve certainly experienced is consider the design of some electrical buildings, for example, with hundreds of drawings each. The drawings are submitted for review, some are reviewed. Code one, code two, some are rejected, the suppliers will resubmit only the docs that require changes. And of course managing this back and forth can be very cumbersome. And then there’s brownfield projects. So many have tens or hundreds of projects happening concurrently during turnarounds or this kind of work. And many time you can have dozens or hundreds of projects going on, on the same asset.

Equipment can be modified at site. And then you have installations, you have red lines that have to be sent back and managed as well. And like I said, often several people working on the same equipment, so MOC is absolutely critical. And I’ll add it’s not just the project documents, but integrations with other systems now. SAP and other enterprise systems are critical to an organization, so without good integration, the manual effort is tremendous. Another point is that there’s just many stakeholders. Documentation has different destinations. After a project, it needs to be transitioned to maintenance in some cases retained for regulatory or audit purposes. A few years ago I was involved with setting up a program for GDPR compliance, which was the privacy legislation that came out of Europe. So we had to review our engineering documentation methods because things like work charts had contact numbers and these required retention policies. So admittedly, this was when the rules were first introduced, but the exercise of then trying to set this up in a file based system was absolutely massive.

And the fourth thing that I’ll mention as a challenge is that I think implementation has to be well planned and organized with a view to future requirements. I heard one anecdote from a colleague here in the industry that he’d seen a system designed around PO numbers. Probably very convenient from a commercial perspective, but every time work was needed in maintenance or future project, the tag number would have to be referenced against the original table of POs and tags in a spreadsheet. So obviously very cumbersome. We’re blessed today somewhat that documents can have metadata. And that allows us to search based on the need, whatever the specific query we’re looking at, this is truly a valuable functionality.

So for example, documents can have metadata that tags them as technical, operational, commercial, et cetera, and obviously a great convenience. So I’ve touched on records management with my GDPR example. But beyond document control, just touching briefly on records management as well, there’s additional considerations. Sometimes there are legal requirements and every company does this differently and they’re very important. There are often multiple tools. Records can be on SharePoints, on drives, on ECM systems. And you can have multiple systems. You can have an HR and a finance systems with different teams having different preferences. The systems are often very varied and it makes it very difficult to manage all the tools. And certainly companies in IT departments want to offer flexibility, the same time some prescriptive requirements exist just to maintain compliance and address the overall needs. So this also becomes a bit of a challenge for an organization to manage.

Permissions in the past, everything was locked down, closed by default, opened by exception. And then permissioning had to be managed. Management of data. So systems, sometimes the backends are just not set up to have the capabilities for new needs that come up. As I mentioned my experience with GDPR and some of the requirements around that. We all know there’s still a lot of paper and sometimes massive storage is required. Now there are great scanning solutions now around this and intelligent scanning solutions that can help, but obviously still a component of our lives. Another thing that of course is common, is that sometimes companies have older tools that are just not worth migrating at a certain point in time. So you end up with partial migrations and you still have legacy databases or legacy systems that need to be used. And document sharing internally, externally, within an organization can still be a big task. Transmittals need to be created. Huge amount of data in systems like invoicing systems as well.

Next slide please. So quickly, briefly, and the Newgen team will elaborate on this obviously much more. But how do solutions like this help address this digital transformation in document management? Well, a project is linked to the WBS based on document repositories. So you have a complete overview. You can have upfront project definitions with explicit user access management, so who can see it. What, when, where and some consideration of future needs at this point is excellent. Because then that’s addressed. You don’t need your finance people talking to your engineering people to find certain things. There’s a simplified review, approved validate process, reduced manual intervention and of course, audit tools to track and monitor these things are critical.

The tools can provide the submittals and transmittals, and thus support the drawing and documentations and as well, track revisions and version control. So obviously great asset to a project integration with systems like SAP and other enterprise systems is critical. And there’s store and search project wide document functionality. And metadata can be used as a query. So the tools I think, also allow in browser renditions of the various file formats. So makes reviews and approvals much easier. And there’s an ability to annotate documents, drawings on the go throughout the project. So we’ll go to the next slide and the Newgen team will talk a little bit more about this specific tool and elaborate.

So how does Wipro fit into something like this? So Wipro is a large IT services organization with many solutions and we have a large engineering practice that does a lot of work in this area. So we can certainly support the implementation of solutions like Newgen’s. And it’s not just the tactical implementation, but also the business and engineering process, consulting and design. So understanding an organization’s processes and needs can be built right into the front end of one of these implementations. Wipro has been helping our customers with managing engineering data across life cycles of documents from creation, all the way to destruction and disposal. And some of the bullets listed here, we have a practice that has resources to support many of these functions as well.

So we can help across each stage in this journey, through the digital transformation. And we’ve also developed some really interesting AI tools that help in the data management across systems. For example, in the metadata extraction from documents, creating intelligent documents and solutions like this. We understand the engineering data management needs across different domains obviously. And from domains and functions, so whether it’s an EPC and owner, there’s special considerations and obviously every company is unique. But then also verticals or industry domains that might require certain special considerations can be understood. So we can help not only in managing the data digitally, but across the handoff stages from projects to operations seamlessly. And what this allows is a kind of digital thread for the entire life cycle of the asset, pardon me, right from the tag creation, in the pin ID to the disposal.

So there’s a real future proofing benefit in doing this at the front end of a project. If a company wants to continue with their digital journey with digital twins, asset management, predictive analytics, AI, all of these fantastic solutions that are changing and helping our industry so much, the fundamentals are in place to allow this to be done. Next slide, please. So simply then I think the goal for us all, we want to simplify our work considering just the massive amounts of documentation that are part of our lives. We want to reduce inefficiency and manual possible errors from manual document managements and manual interventions. And we want to design systems that address the needs of the various stakeholders throughout the organization, simply without adding a new burden to the maintenance of these systems. And the final point is I think these days with the pace of change and the digital opportunities out there, we really want to be ready for the future needs of the company as we progress. So I’ll stop there and I’ll hand it back to the Newgen team.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             Well, thanks, Carlos. Thanks for your insight. So I guess a few takeaways from your discussion, it’s around that projects are becoming complex. Another challenge is that we are dealing with multiple stakeholders, whether it’s in terms of approvals or it’s in terms of, routing documents. Integration is a major challenge because to provide a kind of a seamless journey to the customer or to the user, that becomes and especially when you’ve got legacy applications lots of them, searching becomes another issue. How do I search through this whole web of information that I have? How do I get the information? How do I put the right metadata into it? Then of course, things are on legal requirements auditing and also on flexibility, agility, because businesses change, requirements change. How do you manage all these things? I think really thanks for these insights. Now I’d like to a request we Vineet, to come over and take us through one of these journeys where a lot of the points that you mentioned, in terms of challenges are being addressed with the solutions. So Vineet, over to you.

Vineet Pushkar:                Yeah. Thanks Pranav. So thanks Carlos, for setting up the perspective. So as we go around the solution, I would like to quickly summarize to what Carlos and Pranav talked about as a problem statement. While we try to manage the projects inside the organizations, there are lot of dependency on the submittals and the transmittals that revolve around various streams of projects. And the way we track them, we have seen that most of the customers, the way they track them, the way they try to review, approve and associate these documents with various work breakdown structures and activities inside the project, becomes really critical while completing these particular activities inside projects successfully. So keeping that in mind, few of the aspects that becomes really critical for these kind of solutions are primarily there should be a unified project documentation management support, over the project life cycle of any of such organizations, which lies primarily under the EPC segment.

So they should get a unified interface through which they’ll be able to have all the submittals under multiple disciplines. Bringing them to the right channel of processing, be it through document intensive workflows or template based document generated through templates, workflow there. Or be it centralized repository for the project documents, which are quickly aligned with the project plans and help them track the project plan and activities. So keeping all those problem statements in mind, we have designed a solution, which I’ll walk you through in the next 20 minutes. So they also talk about all these aspects of the solution, but the quick thing to start with would be where does it actually find it existence?

So the generic platform over which this particular solution is developed is a Newgen One Contextual Content Services Platform. So we call it Newgen One, which supports the complete project document life cycle, right from the capture of the documents from multiple channels, be it through professional scanning, be it all the pre digitized documents getting onboarded, all those quick analysis of the documents with respect to the quality of the documents or the intelligent extractions and the related indexing of the documents that has to be done, is supported through the capture part of the application. Then once these documents be it electronic, be it physical, gets captured. It needs to be pushed to right set of processes under functions inside the project. So those processes could be readily defined using the low-code application platform. So every part of the process is configurable in this particular platform. So that whenever you try to define a process flow or the user interfaces or the business rules that govern the processes, everything is configurable.

That gives the end users, the agility to make changes in the process or the SOPs involved in the process and carry on with the process throughout the business operations. It also has certain elements of analytics so that all the data level analytics that needs to be performed over the process life cycles could be easily monitored. And you can generate reports and analyze the particular functions and KPIs carries, which are involved in various stages of the document. It also helps in content collaboration through multiple channels again. So once you capture these documents, you process them, you can store it into enterprise wide centralized repository. So that particular repository would help you manage these documents with respect to all the security aspects, how and who should access these documents, extending over the retention, the disposition of these documents. So all that are maintained inside the same platform.

Then a very critical part of it, which is supported in this platform is the extension of these particular documents that are captured, processed, stored into the Newgen repository that can also be extended to all the peripheral applications, the third party systems be it as Carlos was mentioning about the SAP. So SAP being one of those famous ERPs, which are widely used in such industries or be it any other ERP, you can extend these documents to the ERPs, to the project management applications or for that matter the engineering drawing, or the native AutoCAD softwares through which you may want to edit these drawings and documents. So this Newgen One Contextual Content Services Platform helps you with every stage of the project document life cycle.

Quickly moving to the system overview of the solution that we offer which is called Newgen Engineering Drawing Management System. So Carlos briefly tested upon the modules of it. I’ll quickly walk you through each of these modules in detail, in my subsequent presentation. Wherein we help create the project definitions. So it is done into two ways. Either you can have this imported from your parent project, transactional system. For example, SAP project system or for that matter any other project transaction system that you might be using. So the system has the capability to integrate with those project systems, bring down the definition over here, which includes the project metadata, the project WBS, the project document repository level breakdowns as well as the activities and the sub activities and the plans that are involved inside it.

So you can have those project definitions brought in over here, so that a centralized document management and archival repository based on the project definition from the project systems could be brought in place and connect the parent project transactional system with the document repository. So that every time a submittal is made against any of the WBS or its subsequent activities, those submittals can directly be accessed from those particular business objects or the project WBS from the transactional system itself. And at any point in time, a two way communication can happen between both the systems. Then we have the plan and progress schedule as a next part of it. Wherein you can create a plan over here inside the system. You can track these plans with all the submittals and even the transmittals and all the kind of review workflows that get associated with each type of project documentation that are there in place.

The system also has the compliance checklist execution. So you can actually create and execute all those compliance checklists that are part of different stages of the project. So these are user defined checklists and this could be created on a project level or even on activity level itself, so that it could be adhered to all the compliancies that are mandatory within the project. Then you have the review, approval and validation workflows, which are again dynamic in nature and can be created as and when a particular document needs to be reviewed and approved. So the system gives the flexibility to define these workflow routes on the go, so that you can have all those dynamic workflows [inaudible 00:27:38] workflows or for that matter sequential and pallet workflows as been required. Then you have vendor communications like transmittal management in place so that whatever transmittals you may want to generate could be generated out of the templates. And I’ll quickly showcase that as well. Then you can have the procurement progress could use the tracking and monitoring of all the key aspects of data around it and the operation and maintenance part.

So the entire drawing and the document approval that happens around this particular solution, happens in a five stage workflow, which could be dynamically put on any of the subject inside the work breakdown structure inside the solution. So those five stages are create, assign, review, approve and issue. So at the create stage, you can either upload various submittals that has come for a particular project team to look into and work upon, so those could be engineering drawings or could be some technical queries, some contractual obligations, some other documents that might have come for the project team to take care of.

So you can have all those created or uploaded into the system. From there on these documents could be pinned inside a particular project based on the better data. And from inside the project, these particular documents could be assigned to various set of users who can work upon it. So it could be the owners assigning the particular set of documents to the reviewers, to the approvers. And finally, once the review and approval cycle is completed, it could be archived and issued to the external wall through transmittals management. So these transmittals could be of pre-configured templates, which could be for the internal users, for the external users, depending upon the nature of transmittal or the issuance that is subject on a particular document. So this is the generic way the system workflow works.

Now I’ll quickly get into the quick screen based demo around these solutions. So this is where you define the project definition. So you can simply integrate with any of the third party project system based on a project quote and that will help them fetch the remaining fields that are there. So all these fields are configurable and can be designed as per the project. So once you have defined all those project details over here, then the dashboard allows you to upload documents like contract specs, scope of works, scope responsibility metrics and the end number of documents that might be valued for a particular project. So those new definition of projects could be made from the screen itself, so that you can add new documents over here. And this could be color coded. So this is one more thing, the solution that is appearing over here is a base screen. It could be the UIUX, could be pre-configured as per the end customers.

Now, once you try to define these documents, you can also have the set of users and groups who can access the document. So while uploading the documents, you can have those project user access management defined over here, or the documents itself. Once the project is defined, the complete list of WBS appears inside the project. So you can have all those activities that are performed inside the project, appear into every project into a T structure. So you can have the project details visible over here, you can have the checklist execution as the next part. So this is how a checklist executed. So whatever compliance documents that you have a set of checklists for compliance, whether you want to see that at the beginning of the project, you have the right set of inputs available.

Like I’ve created one small project input checklist. So before initiating the project, you would want to see that all the input compliancies are being met or not. So you can just run the compliance checklist, save it, generate it and store it into the repository so that you have it for compliance purpose. So once you define the compliance, the compliance checklist form could be generated and e-signed from the system itself, and stored against the project. Similarly, you can define any other compliance that you may want to and e-sign those compliance executions and store it for future purposes. Similarly, you can have design development plan created. So you can define the important milestones of the project and keep a track on them from the system itself. Again, we can integrate with the project planning systems from third parties, like Primavera or Microsoft projects, and have an interactive tracking of those plans with the submittals and transmittals that are made in the system.

So once that is done, we have a project progress schedule. So this particular progress schedule is based on the work breakdown structure. So that for every part of the project, for every WBS of the project, like you see over here, we have mentioned the section of the project so far. Just an example we have taken a hall section of the project wherein we are uploading drawings that have come for review and approval. So against every drawing number, a drawing can be uploaded. And the rest of the fields that are associated with it would get dynamically updated as and when the work progresses on a particular drawing into a particular WBS. Then you can have the entire revision history in the same plan, so that whatever actions are taken on those drawings, whatever revisions or versions that keep on changing on the drawing are tracked from the same interface.

So once you have that PPPs created, you can have those drawings uploaded against each of the drawing number. So this is how it’ll appear. So you’ll be able to see the rendition of any DWG or for that matter the in document type can be viewed in the browser itself. So this would have an annotation window around it, so that user can annotate these drawings at various levels. And then finally run our workflow for the review and approval side of it. So there could be a design checklist for the drawing level activities also. And then finally you define the users who will be the reviewers, who will be the approvers and you can annotate these drawings and send into a review approval workflow. So once you send it for reviewer, you can also add comments to it. These comments get actually auto accumulated into a comment resolution sheet, which is Excel sheet that gets automatically created the moment the reviewers and the users start commenting over those drawings or documents. And this gets exported with the drawing wherever you want to send these particular drawing, post review and approval inside the system.

So once these drawing are reviewed, automatically it’ll move to the approver’s queue and then the approver approves it and if it needs to be transmitted, the user can select the particular drawing and transmit it to the parties that are required to work upon it. So this is how a transmittal queue would look like. So users can select these drawings whom they want to transmit through the transmittals and support selection they can generate a transmittal. And that generated transmittal along with a set of documents. And the drawing that are supposed to be sent to the external world, could be sent through emails or could be pushed to portals along with a transmittal template like these. So this particular template can be pre restored in the system. And depending upon the kind of usage of this particular transmittal, the transmittal template gets automatically generated for each of the drawing that is being transmitted. So you’ll have all those issue types defined like approval, construction issue, design issue, whatever the purpose of these particular, a transmittal could be auto punched and the template would generate the exact transmittal document.

The system has the capability to send it through email or push it to a portal or maybe you can take a printout also if required and send it to the external agencies. The system also has the capability to generate time based links and send it over email so that the users can come as a guest to this application and have a look over those drawings and documents they need to work up on. And those links could be time based. So once that particular time period expires, the link would not function. So there are multiple ways to communicate with the external users along with this transmittal management system that exists. So likewise, the way I showcased the engineering drawing review and approval, the same kind of workflows could be created for any project documents that might be in place. Be it a technical query generation, be it a comment resolution sheet, deviation request, plan change memo, lesson learned, a final dossier vendor certificate, site instructions. So these are some of the document types that are readily supported.

However, the templates come without any functional dependency. So you can create any sort of document review and approval workflow on the fly with this particular system, that would work into a similar way. So I’ll just quickly cover a technical query part of it. So if you see these technical queries, again appear into a similar way as a register. And the system gives you a form to create the technical query. So once you fill up this form, a technical query like this is generated in the form of a document and can be sent across to users, the way transmittals are sent. So this is how the entire system functions. Now we can take questions if you have any.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             Thanks Vineet. Thanks for taking us through such a detailed overview of the solution. And if we have Carlos also there, probably I see a few questions that… So before we get into that, so Vineet, if you could kind of help us understand what are the typical benefits that you have seen the customers have received wherever you have implemented a similar solution. Maybe if you could just point out three or four once.

Vineet Pushkar:                Sure Pranav., So what we have seen into our past projects is, whenever such implementations are done, the projects teams that are involved into these organizations, tend to interact with works contractors and the engineering vendors from across the globe. So the submittals and for a particular project could be from various geographies. And since these submittals are in the form of heavy documents like imitating drawings or maybe project dockets. So the submittal in itself becomes typically slow when it is not automated or it is taken through a system like these. So once the particular system is implemented, the submittal of the documents become very fast. Then once you submit these documents inside a project engineering system like this, communication between the designer and the reviewer, again becomes very easy. Because there could be a design vendor for a particular engineering drawing that sitting into a different geography, working for a project that is into a different geography. So exchange of these drawings with the right set of questions, annotations, review, comments, becomes very hassle free and then tracking of-

Pranav Bhardwaj:             So that basically means that you are actually reducing a lot of delays that are there in the system, because of the to and fro of this information otherwise. Carlos, I’m sure you would’ve also seen all these delays you mentioned that in your discussion. Sorry Vineet, please go ahead.

Vineet Pushkar:                Yeah. So definitely the turnaround time is reduced heavily. Secondly, managing all these artifacts for a project in terms of submittals and transmittals into unified repository. Again it’s a big solution to the problem wherein the tracking of a project in itself becomes very difficult when you have all these submittals sectionables or all these documents lying into a repository, which is not readily connected with the project WBS and its activities. So again, the entire project execution and tracking becomes really easy and that actually helps in solving the internal operational hustles that a particular project team faces.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             And when you multiply this by let’s say hundreds of projects that are going on in parallel, then that increases the complexity again, which Carlos was mentioning. Things are getting complex and then how do we manage them, tracking them, providing the visibility into the operations. So, great insights. And you just touched about works contractor. So what are the different ways to interact with these agencies, like the works contractors, design engineers and the other third party vendors?

Vineet Pushkar:                So yeah, I touched it upon that briefly into my presentation also. So mainly we give all the possible ways of interaction with these third party agencies involved. So what we do is we give email support that is readily embedded inside the solution itself. So that any particular transmittal that used to be taken out to these external agencies could be directly emailed from the project system itself, from the system that I showcased right now. Second is we also have the capability to push these particular communications to the organization portals so that if they have works contractor logging in through vendor portals inside the organization, they could have these kind of communications directly pinned down into their part of the vendor portal.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             So does that mean all the communication that is there is being done via the system and therefore everything is tracked, everything is audited, everything is in control. Does that mean the same there?

Vineet Pushkar:                Yeah, so primarily we are the backend system for this. So we help them process all the document intensive workflows around it. And every document intensive workflow would have these communication channels with the external agencies also. So we directly push them onto the vendor portals or through emails or maybe time based links for our system directly. So that is how it works.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             So, thanks Vineet. So this brings us to a very important question, Carlos, I’ll push this to you. We are talking about shrinking times of the project, but typically if you are looking at this kind of a transformational project, so what would be the typical implementation timelines for such a solution? I mean, does it take years or what is it like?

Carlos Santos:                    Not at all. A solution can be 18 to 24 weeks, but I do encourage companies to think well ahead and with time about everything they want the solution to do, because that upfront work and that perhaps anticipation of future needs is where you really start to derive some of the great benefits down the road. The implementation itself, depending on complexity, like I said, 1824 weeks. It’s not a tremendous amount of work.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             Wow. So you mean that all this complexity that’s currently hidden in the processes of organizations, they can be kind of brought up the curve, as we say, within this timelines. This is really incredible. Thanks. And one more thing, this is an investment, so if I make this investment once, can this investment be harvested by other departments who may have different needs, Carlos?

Carlos Santos:                    Yeah, absolutely. Once the platform is introduced, various departments could use the same application.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             Right. So we are saying that the ROI does not only stay with this project or this solution, you could build multiple solutions like these and-

Carlos Santos:                    Absolutely. And the more you layer on obviously the better the ROI once the work is done, the more you get out of it, the better.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             Excellent. Excellent. And Vineet, it just coming back to you in terms of integration capabilities of the solution, if you could touch a bit. I know you did talk about it, but where do you see the need to integrate with third parties in the process cycle?

Vineet Pushkar:                Yeah Pranav. So the very first one happens to be with the project systems in place. So all those EIP based transactional systems, be it SAP or project systems are from a worker or maybe the project monitoring tools like Primavera or Microsoft projects. So they have already integration use cases with us. So be it the fetching the project definitions or maybe trying to give project WBS support on the document level, to those ERPs. One of those integration use cases happens to be there.

Then the project plan or activity based tracking wherein we see the submittals being worked upon and when we progress with the work item life cycle, the same gets updated back in the project plan in the Primavera or the project systems. The third one being maybe integration with the systems like AutoCAD wherein the design or the engineering drawings over there and then get submitted for review over here. And then again, once we try to edit those review drawings with the review comments to be incorporated directly into the AutoCAD. So those are some of the use cases and then definitely the vendor portals and the email integrations that are there in place.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             Right. We just did see a few on those screens where you were making some annotations and making some notes on the AutoCAD files. So that’s an amazing thing. Great. And I’ll just like to take a last question, Carlos, and this is for you. So in terms of your experience with customers, typically is change management, how do organizations take that? And is that a challenge and what could we do? Or do solutions like these really help adapt to how business was done and should be done and can be done, rather going forward once they go live with the solution? So are there any challenges around them that you’ve seen and what do you say we could kind of overcome them?

Carlos Santos:                    So I would, I would always say that change management is something that shouldn’t be neglected, regardless of the size of the solution. So involving the people with hands on use of any application, any process, in the design and thinking about the process implementation, is absolutely critical. Nobody likes naturally the things to come in without their inputs. And of course, organizations as well, don’t want that, because there’s so much that you can miss without knowing what individuals are contributing to a particular process. And often we have views of what that is, but we don’t have the hands on insight that the individual doing the activity does.

So change management, absolutely fundamental. I think a process like this, is not as complex as some big system changes. And involving the right people, it’s something that’s often quite welcome because of the simplification of many things. I never want to underemphasize the value of change management, regardless on the size or complexity, regardless if it’s 24 weeks or 24 months of a project. But obviously the simpler the application to integrate, the easier the process. But never ignore change management.

Pranav Bhardwaj:             Absolutely. Absolutely. Great answer. Thanks, Carlos. And thanks, Vineet. It was a very insightful session. Both of you gentlemen provided some really, really good information and I’m sure the audience today would really have taken back a lot of valuable, there’ll be a lot of valuable takeaways. The takeaway for me is that there is a lot of work that’s manually done right now. And we do need to make sure that the content that we have, it is better utilized now, we make that information as I started and we make that information start flowing in a way that we can really create value out of that. So with that, I’d like to thank everyone for joining us today and we look forward to your questions. If there are any more, please do feel free and send them across. And we’ll be more than happy to answer them. Thanks, Carlos, Vineet. Appreciate your time today. Thank you everyone. Bye, bye.

Carlos Santos:                    Thank you everyone.