Case studies
What changed, and why
Operators who moved off spreadsheets and shared folders onto systems that match how the work actually runs, and the delivery teams we have built alongside them. Client names are published with their permission, and the operational detail is real.
- 12
- engagements, each with the client named
- 12
- sectors, from out-of-home media to legal technology
- 4
- Sarva applications in production across them
01 Gold Sign Media Out-of-home media Inventory at Gold Sign Media, an out-of-home media operator in Maharashtra, lived in a spreadsheet that was copied, emailed and edited by several people at once, so the authoritative list of which sites were free in a given fortnight existed only in whichever version the sales team happened to open. Proof of display was a folder of photographs named by date, with no reliable link between an image and the campaign it evidenced, which meant assembling a client report was an afternoon of manual matching and occasionally produced the wrong picture. Invoicing was rebuilt by hand from booking notes, so a shortened campaign or a site swapped mid-flight only reached the invoice if somebody remembered to mention it. The result was routine double-booking, disputes that could not be settled with evidence, and revenue that quietly leaked between the booking and the bill. AdBoard 02 JK Kitchen Commercial kitchen fabrication At JK Kitchen, a stainless-steel fabricator in Pune, every quotation started as a copy of an older spreadsheet, which meant the pricing logic in circulation was whatever happened to be embedded in the file somebody duplicated that morning. Sheet material rates, wastage allowances, fabrication time and margin had all been adjusted locally over the years, so two estimators pricing a comparable counter could arrive at different numbers for reasons nobody could reconstruct afterwards. Because dimensions were typed rather than modelled, an error in a single cell propagated silently through material and labour, and the customer received a document that gave no visual confirmation that the unit being priced was the unit they had described. Approval was informal, so discounts were applied in the sheet without any record of who authorised them or against which cost base. Quote 03 Aries Agro Manufacturing and distribution At Aries Agro, an agri-inputs manufacturer with a national distributor network, orders arrived as WhatsApp messages, photographs of handwritten sheets and phone calls, and were retyped into the accounting system by the internal sales desk. Product names were whatever the distributor called them, quantities were sometimes packs and sometimes units, and a schemed price agreed verbally in one conversation was invisible to anyone processing the order later. Field officers reported visits in a group chat, so there was no dependable record of which distributors had been seen in a given month, what was discussed or what was committed. Outstanding balances lived only in accounts, which meant new orders were regularly accepted from distributors already well past their credit terms and the problem surfaced weeks afterwards during collections. Field 04 GOI Car & Taxi Vehicle rental Bookings reached GOI Car & Taxi, a self-drive vehicle rental operator, through several channels at once, walk-ins, phone calls, aggregator partners and repeat customers messaging directly, and each was written into a different place. Availability was judged from a wall board and a booking register that were both updated after the fact, so a vehicle could be promised to a customer while it was still out on hire or sitting in a workshop. Maintenance was scheduled from memory and from whatever the last driver mentioned, which meant servicing tended to happen when a vehicle was already unavailable for a booking rather than in a planned gap. Commission owed to partners was reconstructed at month end from booking slips, so disputes were common and there was no straightforward way to see which channel was actually profitable once commission was accounted for. Rentals 05 Kite Medica Pharmaceutical and medical supply Kite Medica supplies healthcare products to doctors, nurses, paramedical staff and patients, and by 2016 was running that business with more than a hundred people across several regions. Its marketing executives worked from remote locations and travelled a great deal, and the material they needed in front of a client, product manuals and supporting documents, was produced and circulated through the ordinary office routes. That put a delay between a representative in the field and the office, so requests and queries raised during a visit reached the management team slowly and were answered slowly. Sales reporting, incentive calculation and month-end payroll all depended on the same paperwork arriving and being read, which meant the management team was looking at a picture of the field that was always a few days old. Field 06 Sthal Matrimony Matchmaking services InscoMont Services had recently entered Indian matchmaking with two products, the Sthal Matrimony application and a second application, Rishta Dobara, that did not yet exist. The Sthal app had been built by another vendor and was not meeting the business, with problems in its design, its flow and its performance, and InscoMont had the domain expertise to say what was wrong but no in-house technical team to fix it. That left them dependent on the vendor who had written the code for every judgement about whether a change was feasible, which is the position in which a consumer product stops responding to its own market. The work therefore had to cover two different things at once, restructuring a live application that already had users, and building a new one from nothing. 07 Cavory LLC Legal technology Cavory set out to build a practice product for lawyers and law firms that had to exist on every surface a firm actually uses, a web application, an Android app, an iPhone app and a Windows desktop application, without the four drifting into four different products. The harder constraint was where the data lives. Legal documents and matter records are exactly the material a firm is least willing to hand to somebody else's infrastructure, so the system had to run against a firm's own in-house servers as readily as against the cloud, and had to keep the two in step rather than forcing a choice between them. On top of that the product was expected to work with the tools firms already run their business on, with synchronisation to QuickBooks, Salesforce and G Suite, and to support several lawyers in a firm collaborating on the same matter rather than each holding a private copy. 08 Waiu Consumer payments Waiu is a dine now, pay later payment service, which means a diner discovers it, decides to trust it and uses it inside the space of a meal. That put an unusual weight on the surfaces the company had not yet built. It needed a website, a web application and a mobile application, and the ordinary way those get built is separately, by whoever is available, with the marketing site treated as a brochure and the applications treated as engineering. For a consumer payment product that separation is expensive, because a diner who has just read the proposition on the website and then opens an application that looks and behaves like a different company has been given a reason to hesitate at precisely the wrong moment. 09 Opus Technologies Payments technology Opus Technologies, formerly Opus Software, was running its corporate site as hand-written HTML. Every change meant editing markup, so updating information was a task that had to be requested rather than done, and site maintenance accumulated as a backlog. The company generates a steady stream of news and activity across its offices, and a static estate is the wrong shape for content that arrives weekly. The structure had a second problem underneath the maintenance one, which was that the products and service lines the business actually sells were not what the site put in front of a visitor, and the material Opus had, its history, its service lines, its case studies and its media coverage, had accumulated without a layout that could carry it. The site also was not usable on a phone. 10 TechEdge Services IT services TechEdge Services, an IT services firm in The Woodlands, Texas, delivers customised solutions to its clients across the range from desktops and servers to hardware and software. Its constraint was in delivery rather than demand. The firm needed senior capability to run its development operation, and it was carrying work, a website and mobile functionality that required custom code rather than configuration, that its existing team could not absorb without the rest of the pipeline slipping. That is the position in which hiring is both the obvious answer and the wrong instrument, because the requirement is specific, immediate and not permanent at a fixed size. 11 Sagacity Software Software and data analytics Sagacity Software, founded in 2012, builds advanced software applications and delivers data analytics work for its clients, including Tableau reporting. It had taken on a project with a fixed timeline that its in-house team could not deliver against, and the shortfall was not general capacity but a specific set of skills needed at once and needed briefly. Recruiting to fill it carried two costs that were each worse than the problem, the weeks that sourcing, interviewing and onboarding would take out of a timeline that had none to spare, and the permanent positions that would still be on the payroll once the concentrated phase of development was over. 12 PoochPay Accounts payable software PoochPay provides end-to-end invoice management, with the aim of taking its clients off paper-driven manual accounts payable processes, reducing the cost of running AP, keeping vendors accountable and giving a company a view of what it is actually spending. Delivering that meant two pieces of work at once that its team was not sized for. The application itself needed an overhaul, and underneath it the platform needed a backend capable of holding client invoice data on its servers and processing it on demand rather than in batches. The second gap was analytical rather than an engineering one. A product whose value proposition is visibility into spend needs somebody who can read the data itself, both to shape the reporting clients see and to inform the development decisions being taken around it.