THE KEY FACTORS

The strategic brains that drive Xlicon

The Team

Shiva Shankar

CEO and Executive Director

Shiv has more than 22 years of IT experience in Manufacturing and Software industries in the areas of customer requirements and expectations management, design and construction of sophisticated but easy-to-use software and their timely delivery, IT strategy development and implementation and mentoring and managing teams.
Shiv’s specialities include System analysis, design, IT strategy, IT Planning and Budgeting, Project and Delivery Management.

Shiv has a Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Systems and Analysis from Bharadhidasan University, Trichy and Master of Commerce from Annamalai University, Chidambaram.

ACTIX

A tool for Educational consultants. It helps you to keep a firm grip on the crowd of students, the dynamics of decision changes, multiple requirements of multiple agencies, and smoothly sail you through the sea of reports, certificates, fees, receipts, applications, photos, visas and what not. No more facing problems juggling 30/40 Excel sheets and 50/60 emails a day! You don’t want to lose a single student due to errors and omissions. Do you? Please visit the ACTIX website for details.

EVALUATIX

A versatile questionnaire building tool to evaluate performance and competency. Schools, Colleges, Training Institutes, HR Departments. You can virtually create questions of any multiple choice type.

The database records the questions, the alternative answers, and the right choice. You schedule a test. A notification goes to all the candidates in any part of the world and they can take the test by logging in. You set the time of start and end and have complete control. Security of the questions and answers is assured. The results or the scores are informed timely and efficiently to the concerned

3RD EYE

A Management Review System. The management reviews, records the results, creates action plans, assigns responsibility, follows up on actions; — any department, any division, function wise or geography wise, — small, large or medium. A review schedule is created. The review questions, set in a simple Excel format, is uploaded into the 3rd EYE system. After review, the online questionnaire interface is used to record the review results.

Non-compliances and non-conformances are flagged, and actions for improvement are recorded with target completion dates. Tracking the actions is done by both the manager/supervisor and the beneficiary. The completion is noted by the beneficiary and the manager/supervisor closes the review after verification. High level birds eye view of performance is supported by reports and dashboards. Status at granular level is supported by the same tools. Tracking of actions is made easy by a common interface.

BIZPROP

An efficient Operation Management Support tool for effective control, – controlling tasks, controlling targets for multiple businesses at multiple locations. Even a mini-conglomerate can receive benefit from this one! Built on an user-friendly platform, controlling tasks and targets had never been easier from a single source. Actually it could be called â€˜The CEO Right Hand! Try it out to appreciate it.

ALLEVIATE

This one is a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) tool. It conforms to the BIA requirements of any international Business Continuity Management (BCM) System standard like ISO 22301.

In business incidents do happen and they do create an impact. You want to protect your business from discontinuance due to that impact. Therefore, you need to plan. You do business continuity planning (BCP) by conducting a BIA, and you come to understand what part of your business is critical and what is not. That forces you to set priorities when you launch a recovery plan. BIA also highlights the resources critical for immediate response, and then for continuity and recovery.

ALLEVIATE will provide you a sequential and methodical process for completing the BIA. You don’t need any expert intervention on an on-going basis. At the onset, the organization structure is defined. Individuals responsible for doing the BIA of various offices/departments are assigned with access rights. The assigned persons map the processes which are critical over a time period, determine the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPD). All the Critical resources essential for making the BCM arrangements are listed for each of the critical processes.

You can use ALLEVIATE globally across multiple countries and offices with all the BIA info centralized within a simple database. The info is retrieved based on Access rights provided.

Social Media

A path breaking social networking platform for small and medium businesses partners with Xlicon to design, build, maintain and manage it

Challenge

A Social Media company required to build a highly scalable social networking platform focused on small and medium businesses (SMBs) to provide them with a one-stop shop for all the resources they needed to succeed along with friendly collaborative tools. The features of the site had to be conceptualized and firmed up on the fly during the design phase so that innovative features could be introduced. The site had to scale up since this was to target the SMBs globally and also address performance, redundancy and security concerns to the satisfaction of all stakeholders.

The company required that the work be handled by a team who, though not directly employed by them, would act in all practical purposes like an insourced team. This was particularly dictated by the fact that a site of this nature would require frequent updating, addition of new features and maintenance on an on-going basis with rapid response.

Our Solution

A group of five experienced developers from Xlicon team was dedicated to work very closely with the client company design and technical team. Rapid prototyping with several iterations supported the client to flesh out their vision for the site requirements. The user interface and design features were built up by Xlicon contribution.

Microsoft Azure Cloud was selected for deploying the site. This not only allowed the use of Microsoft .NET powerful features but also provided a robust, highly scalable, secure platform and cost effective.

Xlicon process-oriented approach was agile. It ensured that delivery was prompt, the quality was high, and all the risks were managed without any major impact.

Bottom Line

A win-win situation, both reaped rich benefits. The Social Media Company received quality work delivered on time, and Xlicon cost was unexpectedly very reasonable. The company launch strategy was a piece of cake.

Technology Platform

Microsoft Windows Azure, SQL Azure

MOSS (Mobile Online Solution System)

An online Service and Repair Management System. It supports the business of a mobile phone repair company having service centers all around the country.

The client supports OEMs with their customer warranty responsibilities for repair and maintenance of PCs, servers and laptops. He wanted to launch a new business of repairing mobile phones. The business plan envisioned self-owned repair stores along with franchisee owned stores.

Xlicon made the entire business operation automated, centrally controlled and monitored. A high level of integration of the processes from supply chain through to the delivery of service to his end-customer was installed within the target time. A key issue was the simplicity of use since the personnel had very little experience in using software. The personnel of the numerous stores in the wide network of far flung places were too happy to use the system for its simplicity of use. Happily they gave great service to the complete satisfaction of the end customer.

How Xlicon helped

In-depth knowledge of business process workflows was an asset. It helped to design the system in record time. There were numerous processes. All of them were covered, — customer walk-in, out of warranties, AMC, cost estimation, warehouse stock management, job order creation, job assignment, reverse logistics (job transfers from L1, L2 to L3, L4, reverse transfers when a job is completed), quality check, billing, delivery and customer satisfaction tracking and reporting.

User interface design did not need much training. Code and database optimizations ensured reasonably good performance even with dial-up connections.

What happened at the end of the hard work

The client launched his multi-city, multi-store operations within 6 months of commissioning the software. This was critical. The entire business was online and all information flow was visible from the headquarters or from anywhere else. Life became easier for the managers. Happy Ending!

Technology Platform

Microsoft .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows 2008 R2 with IIS 7.0

PFIS

A customized production flow information system (PFIS) for a gravure printing cylinder manufacturing company

Client requirements

The Client manufactures gravure cylinders. He has almost all fast moving consumer goods companies (FMCGs) as his customers. His customers, many of them large MNCs, use these cylinders for printing their packaging materials.

The company has plants at multiple locations. All produce similar types of gravure printing cylinders. The Client wanted a single workflow solution that would standardize the production flow across all the plants. Hence it became necessary to capture many and varied sets of data at each node of the workflow some requiring application of complex business rules. The workmen were unfamiliar with software. They were used to entering data in Excel sheets or paper based registers. And, that was the problem.

How we solved the problem

Xlicon team strong domain experience in both manufacturing and software paid off. This ensured that the complex business logic and branches in the workflow were easily understood and translated into a robust design. The interfaces were kept simple and were standardized across all the modules.

Modules included marketing, design, PPC, stores and inventory, all production stations, quality control and dispatch. Conditions where the raw stock was purchased by the Client and where the stock was provided by the customer were handled without complicating the user navigation.

Comprehensive reporting was built in to support quick decision making.

End Results

A far higher productivity since the system went live. Key decisions are now taken faster and waste has come down, — for both time and material. Monitoring of shop floor performance has become easy with senior management. It now keeps track of the operations during its frequent travels.

Technology Platform

Microsoft .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows 2008 R2 with IIS 7.0

FMIS

Xlicon helped a leading training delivery company in deploying its Franchisee Management Information System (FMIS)

The Client is a reputed education delivery company. It operates on a franchisee mode having franchises running in multiple cities, and each city having multiple locations. It was a challenge to manage operations for such a widely distributed enterprise. But we ensured that the requirements of all the stakeholders were met, — the company management and its operational personnel at one end, the franchisee owners in the middle and the students at the other end of the service delivery spectrum.

Solution

Our team solid background in mapping enterprise processes, re-engineering and converting them into user friendly software applications helped to design a robust application that the Client started using over the Internet and catering to all the different stakeholders needs.

Xlicon system features included booking courses online, managing faculty and class rosters, managing course material inventory across all locations, attendance management and delivering text messages on the students mobiles.

Comprehensive reporting helped support quick decision making.

Final report

Xlicon system is now the operational backbone of the company. Managing franchisees and students across all franchises is now much easier. Management and operational personnel can now focus on growing the business and managing the day to day operations effectively and efficiently. Centralizing data within the system database ensures that the work is now completed within minutes and without errors as against several man days and error prone that existed earlier.

Technology Platform

Microsoft .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows 2008 R2 with IIS 7.0

FILESFOLIO

This is a case of a brick and mortar stationery and office supplies company that wanted to go online

The company goal was to implement its new strategy of targeting individual customers (B2C) online though it was already running a successful business off-line in the B2B space supplying to all the large retailers in this sector in India.

Xlicon solution

For this Client we had built a dynamically managed website that allowed publication of the company portfolio of items inclusive of photos, descriptions and prices. The easy to use administration portal also allows special offers, deals/discounts to be run. The feature of integration with social media sites is helping it to expand its marketing space.

The company went online quite rapidly. Over the last few months the site has seen traction with a lot of enquiries coming in.

Technology Platform

Microsoft .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows 2008 R2 with IIS 7.0