When Prognosys started operations in 2004, market research was still growing as an industry. However, the company saw its business gain momentum within the next four years, as the economy continued to grow. By now, the company began focusing on sales teams within organizations and started profiling client accounts - mapping big accounts according to their spending capacities — and helping organizations understand potential opportunities.

As the demand for sales and market research continued growing, Prognosys eventually began catering to customers such as ONGC and Reliance. There was an increase in demand for its services from the SMB segment.

There has been an emphasis on IT investment in India and Prognosys currently provides intelligence to some of the most renowned players in the industry, including Dell, Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, HP, IBM, Red Hat, and Wipro. “At one point, we started churning out a lot of reports. These reports are usually based on interviews with individuals from a sample group of 200 to 500 people. In our case, we were doing up to 10,000 interviews in a month,” says Sandeep Ranjan, CEO, Prognosys.

As its business grew, the company decided to expand its market research services to overseas markets. Naturally, the company required that its systems and processes work in tune with the growing demand.

The need for speed

At Prognosys, each customer requirement is taken up as a project. Each time a research project was completed, an invoice would be raised and sent to the customer. Due to the legacy nature of its systems and processes, project status updates would be provided manually whenever a customer requested for a status update. This resulted in delays in project completion and receipt of payments.

“Most big enterprises to which we cater, work with a lead time when processing invoices. Hence, a delay of seven days in raising an invoice meant receiving the payment after say 67 days, instead of the stipulated 60 days of account payable time,” informs Ranjan.

Why SaaS

The company felt the need for process automation and decided to look at various applications that would help improve system efficiency. While interacting with SAP, it came across the company’s SaaS-based ERP solution Business ByDesign.

“As an entrepreneurship venture, we did not have a large CAPEX capability. Hence, a solution based on the SaaS model would be better suited to us. With such a solution, we would not have to bear high upfront costs; the OPEX-based nature of the solution suits our business which largely depends on working capital,” informs Ranjan.

As its business grew, the company would require additional features for which it would not be feasible to pay upfront, but only when required. With a cloud-based solution, it could have these features enabled as and when required, and pay as per usage.

The cloud-based solution also meant ease of use for its large mobile workforce. Employees could log in from any location and update the project status or account information on projects.