Enterprise mobility platform helps Cos work better: Kushal Nahata

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SME Times News Bureau | 14 Dec, 2015
In today's day and age, with numerous options being available to a consumer, the concept of brand loyalty is becoming redundant. The speed of execution is what differentiates one business from another, helping it retain and further increase its consumer base. Hence, the use of technology is becoming inevitable for companies with mobile workers, the Co-Founders and CEO of FarEye, Kushal Nahata told SME Times.

He said, today, the customer has multiple options and information available at their channel of choice; everything happens at the speed of light or faster; thus, leveraging technology to ensure quick decision making and driving extraordinary customer experience is the need of the hour - no longer an option but a mandate to retain your customer and not lose it to competitors. Customer expectations are increasing and putting pressure on organizations to digitally transform their operations in order to meet this need.

New Delhi-based FarEye is a mobile workforce management platform that helps organizations to schedule jobs, track execution and evaluate the performance, all in real time. The FarEye platform helps companies across various industries work better.

Excerpts of the interview...

Firstly congratulations for getting the CII India Innovation Initiative Award and being listed as the Startup of the Year for the workforce management category. What exactly is the concept of FarEye?
Kushal Nahata: A SaaS based mobile workforce management platform, FarEye solves the critical problems faced by a manager which is real time co-ordination between consumer requests, mobile workers and field jobs. Such a platform can be used across industries and geographies to make businesses flexible and more responsive. It is a tool to provide business insights to deliver customer & operational excellence and generate more revenue.

How and when this idea came?
Kushal Nahata: The changing work trends emphasized a critical need for access to information at and time and place. At any point in the day an employee must have access to required information and unavailability of that should not become the reason for lag or delayed decision making.

There was huge disconnect between on-field employees and managers back at office. This not only hampered productivity and delayed decision making but also adversely harmed the end consumer.

A lot of time was being wasted on non-revenue generating activities like administrative tasks (preparing reports, paper work etc), idle time, taking wrong routes, first attempt failures etc. FarEye saw this as an area of opportunity to address genuine problems that were faced in day to day management of mobile workers.

How it works and whom are you targeting here?
Kushal Nahata: The FarEye platform enables organizations can schedule jobs, monitor execution and evaluate performance, all automated and in real time. It seamlessly integrates into the existing workflow of the companies to help the optimize their field operations, thus, increasing productivity and customer experience.

FarEye ensures transparency across various stakeholders making it easy for them to include customer vagaries and address unforeseen situations. Through real time flow of information companies are becoming more responsive to their customers & making informed and effective decisions.

Our target is any organization that has field operations.

In today's day and age what role does a technology like FarEye play to impact the end consumer?
Kushal Nahata: In today's day and age with numerous options being available to a consumer the concept of brand loyalty is becoming redundant. The speed of execution is what differentiates one business from another helping it retain and further increase its consumer base. Hence, the use of technology is becoming inevitable for companies with mobile workers. Today, the customer has multiple options and information available at their channel of choice, everything happens at the speed of light or faster, thus, leveraging technology to ensure quick decision making and driving extraordinary customer experience is the need of the hour - no longer an option but a mandate to retain your customer and not lose it to competitors. Customer expectations are increasing and putting pressure on organizations to digitally transform their operations in order to meet this need.

As a start-up what major challenges you think a start-up has to face? What is the biggest challenge your group has faced as a start-up, according to you?
Kushal Nahata: The biggest challenge is getting the right co-founders. An ideal co-founder's personality should be a mix of these things: Industry expertise, credibility & passion. Adding to it., he/she should gel well with the team and should be motivating by standing shoulder-to-shoulder in building the business right. The next comes, having a team that is young, innovative and passionate to create something new. Experienced talent brings with an extremely high cost which start-ups are unable to match. Building our core team was the initial challenge, but we were lucky enough to sort this problem quickly.

Can we know the size and presence of your company now?
Kushal Nahata: Headquartered in Delhi, currently FarEye is spread across 10 and has sold over 50,000 licenses globally. Over 1 million transactions take place on the FarEye platform daily.

Globally enterprise mobility is a billion-dollar market, how you analyze this in terms of both opportunities and challenges?
Kushal Nahata: There are 1.3 billion mobile workers and 85% don't use technology for their operations - this is a huge area of opportunity for a company like FarEye whose vision is to help companies optimize their field operations using technology.

The challenges are that employees in the developing countries are averse to adoption of technology. The rising concern of security due to use of mobile devices poses another threat. However, mobile technology is cheap, accessible & easy to use which makes it attractive to any enterprise. Some of the biggest revenue generating industries like manufacturing and construction spend a dismal amount on technology. Majority of this technology-less 2 billion-plus workers are in the developing world (50% in Asia-Pacific, 10 % in the Middle East and Africa) ensuring immense global opportunity in the market that FarEye is looking to capture.
These figures support us:

Global EM market opportunity expected to be USD 140 billion by 2020
1.5 billion mobile workforce globally by 2016
Spend by enterprises on EM expected to grow 3 to 4 times of total IT spend by 2020

I think in a span of just two years, FarEye has already roped in clients such as GoJavas, Snapdeal, Fabfurnish, Pepperfry, Godrej, ParaMount, DTDC, Bajaj Capital, Apollo Pharmacy and Blue Dart, and bagged two prestigious awards. What are your future plans now?
Kushal Nahata: FarEye has grabbed the leading companies in the logistics space and is now venturing into other sectors like BFSI, healthcare, telecom, consumer durables etc where employees work away from the workplace and there is a requirement of field workforce management. In terms of future expansion., we are looking forward at Asia-Pacific for the market opportunity where internet presentation is high but the potential of technology is not being fully utilized to achieve operational results. In terms of product roadmap : we have Business Process Management ( BPM ) lined up and we are moving towards Internet of Things (IoT).