Aurigo Provides Construction Cos With Industry-Ready ERP

Aurigo is a software product and solutions company that offers its customers in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction verticals its flagship BRIX 2009. The solution, which integrates with standard ERP products, including Microsoft Dynamics AX, makes for an industry-ready ERP for the construction and real estate verticals. Biztech2 spoke to Balaji Sreenivasan, founder and CEO, Aurigo Software, on the company’s focused strategy and plans for the future.

Could you elaborate on the Indian ERP market?

Over the last decade, most business verticals have begun investing in ERP to increase their productivity, control costs and impact their profitability. Each of these vertical businesses has a set of unique needs, which has meant huge customisation around traditional ERPs.

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Aurigo works very closely with Microsoft in delivering comprehensive solution sets for its customers. Could you elaborate on this relationship?

Microsoft and Aurigo have co-invested in building integration connectors between Aurigo BRIX and Microsoft Dynamics AX to create an industry-ready ERP solution that meets almost 80 percent of the business needs of a typical construction or real estate company. The combined solution leverages the functionalities of Microsoft’s ERP platform coupled with industry -specific features for the construction vertical brought to the table by BRIX.

We believe our partnership with Microsoft has been critical to our success and has provided construction and real estate companies an ERP replacement to their home-grown applications that is delivered at an affordable price.

What according to you have been the issues with conventional AEC-specific solutions?

Well, outside of Design and Scheduling software, other products focused on the construction and real estate space are disparate and non-comprehensive. Besides a handful of small home-grown application providers, who each addressed a small portion of the challenge, there were no serious products that provided a single window to automating all processes. This spelt a huge opportunity for us.

What are some of the intricacies of the processes associated with the construction vertical?

If you look at the lifecycle of a typical construction project, after the initial design phase, the only tools available for a construction company to manage its project are generic project management and scheduling applications like MS Project or Primavera. The need of the hour is to be able to seamlessly manage land banks and land parcels, automate project cost estimation using rate analysis and a standard schedule of rates, automate the tendering and bid analysis process, manage the contract, change orders and monitor daily work progress using laptops, digital cameras and GPS to ensure accuracy and transparency in the project. Project managers and construction managers also need to have a cockpit view/ dashboard to view the status of all of their projects and approve work progress and measurement books without actually having to make frequent site visits. Real estate developers also need to compare the running account bills or pay estimates submitted by their contractors or sub-contractors with what they believe is accurate to avoid over payments.

What are your views on delivery models like cloud computing, SaaS etc? Do you have any plans to inculcate them in your delivery roadmap?

We are very excited about cloud computing as we have been early adopters of the same and we believe this is the future. We are already delivering the BRIX solution to all of our customers (with Microsoft Dynamics AX for certain customers) on a completely hosted model, where the end customer does not have any hassles of maintaining the server, ensuring 99 percent uptime, taking periodic backups etc. The entire solution is delivered on the Web, thus, users at the customer organisation can access it from anywhere in the world using a simple browser as long as they are authorised to do so.
We are also seeing increased adoption of this delivery model in India and strongly believe that solutions and products that do not support cloud computing/ SaaS will not survive and make for bad investments.

_BRIX 2009 solution is available both directly and through a select partner network worldwide.
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