SoftTech Engineers: The Leader in Providing Enterprise Construction Business Solutions

It's a widely accepted principle these days, that business is like a warfare. Due to the high level competition the business operations are often compared to the battlefield, leading managers apply principles like those from 'The Art of War' to business situations.

The speed at which your organization moves determine your business success. There for its all about accurate, speedy and controlled performance.

How agile is your construction business organization?

If you try to find the answers you probably need to do an assessment considering factors as presented below:

• The speed at which you send and receive critical business information from various sites.
• The speed at which you can act on information.
• The ability to assess the status of the various activities in your business operations.
• The availability of key information that enables faster decision & adaptive planning.

In essence, for making your construction business more agile, you would need a powerful business management system that facilitates responsiveness - to changes within and outside the organization. OPTICON NextG^TM, the enterprise class construction business management system from SoftTech Engineers Private Limited, Pune (http://www.softtech-engr.com), is specifically designed for distributed construction information management.


OPTICON is ready to implement business suite meant specifically for construction industry. The solution has built in industry's best practices that address four major aspects of construction industry viz: Project Management, Material Management, Sales Management and Finance Management. It also enables optimal process integration and provides seamless collaboration among various function of the enterprise.

OPTICON connects sites and head office through internet / intranet thus providing up-to-date information on all areas of your operations. It has clearly designed all modules that address critical needs of your construction business. It is made especially for construction industry by experts having more than 20 years of Industry experience. Various benefits of OPTICON which industry has received and are receiving are as follows:

Reduce Process Time:

By automating business transactions, optimizing processes, and integrating related process chains spread across multiple departments, offices, and locations, Opticon Accelerator reduces process cycle times to a very high extent. This reduction in process cycle time helps your business to do more work with the same team in shorter timeframe. Not to mention, completing business activities, faster than normal. This also brings in a lot of transparency to the what, how, when, and who of business transactions, so that analyzing and correcting past mistakes becomes easier.

Business Performance Analysis:

OPTICON Accelerator addresses all the project management, financial and operational requirements to execute construction projects. It helps to manage and control const- ruction projects by giving complete and instant access to its progress, take real time snapshots of how profitable the project is with full analysis of costs, revenues, liabilities and subcontractor performance. OPTICON Accelerator provides business performance analysis that helps in making timely, transparent, and well-informed decisions across all levels of management.

Risk Monitoring:

As the business leadership of construction organization, one's biggest concern is to find potential threats to the growth and profitability. That's why risk monitoring becomes a key top management priority. OPTICON Accelerator help your management identifies business risks, and thereby prevents loss or wastage of time and money.

Meeting the Needs:

Unlike generic ERP packages which are essentially designed for manufacturing industries and then are tweaked to suit the construction business requirements, OPTICON Accelerator is a solution that maps the complexities of the construction business and speaks its language.

OPTICON Accelerator is designed,and built by people who have extensive experience in the construction industry. The product started development in the year 2003, and today, it is a well-tested and proven solution at clients in India, Middle East Asia and North Africa.

While preparing for a war, one has to use the weapons that are made for them and have allies who understand their strengths and weakness. The same applies in business.

With OPTICON Accelerator, you can be rest assured that you have the right tools, and with SoftTech Engineers, you have the right ally, for a clear purpose. The Purpose is to make you agile, and win the business warfare.

OPTICON 2.0 NextG^TM on Futuristic Enterprise Architecture:

OPTICON 2.0 NextG^TM is next generation construction work management tool that provides all necessary business functions and a set of extended advanced functions through plug-in. The solution is driven by seven next generation accelerator engines. These engines together in collaboration establish desired business function. Everything a construction enterprise needs as solution can be achieved through system configuration: be it defining key business processes, form design, role entitlement, user management, contextual or proximity search, system audit.

The solution is designed to boost worker productivity through performance monitoring that keep close observation on predefined SLAs. OPTICON 2.0 NextG^TM works as a guide for business users by exhibiting precise decision messages in every critical decision context. It also suggests the best techniques for performing the task in minimum time by suggesting appropriate templates and suggestions. This type of value-informed decision making can help executives work faster and accurately.

The seven next generation engines that serves OPTICON 2.0 system configurations ensures all possible dynamics of business services that a construction enterprise may need over the years.Change in services can be incorporated by configuring simple context driven rules. An abstraction layer on top of all configuration engines enables creating business definitions for processes (workflows), decision support, accessibility, messages & alerts, and reporting. In very little time and effort you can configure the system in every way you want suiting your business processes and best practices. A new set of configuration rules will create a new system behavior. The configuration definition is saved in the system so that you can measure & compare the process improvements with configuration data time to time.

The futuristic component architecture implements service oriented communication between building blocks in the same layer and across layers, most cases it communicates to same layer or one layer above or below. Well designed message services follows open standards message format and protocol ensuring boundary less information flow within and outside the system. No matter how the existing legacy systems are built OPTICON ensures flawless communication in an integrated environment.

Its Architecture Style is designed considering best of industry standards, industry consortium's' and institutions. The architecture style presents process driven information flow, status of the task, staff workplace, information groupings for user patterns, and decision support for every critical task. User accessibility implements important W3C standards and a set of Accessibility 508 standards.

OPTICON 2.0 mobility ensures accessibility anywhere-anytime through a native program on android phones. You can review and approve a task sitting in an airport lounge or construction site, a surveyor can upload the survey report and photograph, and you can upload your daily work progress (measurement book) using mobile interfaces. In short time OPTICON 2.0 mobility will be available on standard web browsers that you can access from your mobile devices.

Summary:

When global economic pressures and uncertainty have placed additional stress on the IT infrastructure, innovative value-based solutions can substantially reduce costs of your construction operations. The OPTICON NextG^TM will assist your organization in establishing a direct relationship between IT services and business success or ''wins.”. To fully exploit each and every element of the solution, it is critical to map those components to your mission-critical business processes and the measurable milestones.

For your organization OPTICON is a necessary solution for achieving and sustaining competitive advantage in a global and dynamic marketplace, it can be also viewed as an important solution for cost efficiency improvements.

About SoftTech:

ISO 9001:2008 accredited, Headquartered in Pune, India, SoftTech Engineers Pvt. Ltd. is a leading software product company with focus on the Architecture-Engineering-Construction (AEC) vertical.

Since its inception in 1996, SoftTech has put forth an impressive array of innovative software products in architecture, engineering and construction enable government as well as private enterprises. They help these organizations to plan, approve, procure, manage and maintain a range of infrastructure assets. Our solutions for the government have enabled effective e-governance for urban local bodies, development authorities and works organizations for which it has won several awards & recognitions.

About Author:

Vijay is alumnus of IIT Mumbai and a first generation entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in development of complex CAD/CAE/Project Management software. He has been the driving force behind building SoftTech Engineers Private Limited, a software product company of repute during the last 15 years. He has steered the company towards international, award-winning success by envisioning software solutions that enable complex processes in the AEC (Architecture-Engineering-Construction) industry into a matter of a few mouse clicks.