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Extrieve Technologies: A one-Stop-Shop for Document Management Solutions

Simon Sunny, CBO | Thursday, 9 September, 2021
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Simon Sunny, CBO

Over the last few years, data has well-established its unassailable dominance across the business realm. Thanks to today’s ever-flourishing digital landscape, organizations across the verticals have access to more data than ever before. It is of paramount importance that you realize that this data plays a pivotal role in the vital decision making process of every organization. To ensure that they have the right data for decision-making at the right time, it is imperative that companies invest in document management solutions (DMS) that improve visibility, reliability, security, and scalability. Reliable, up-to-date data available in the right format at the right time can do wonders for organizations in terms of responding more efficiently to market changes and customer needs. However, in order to optimize the benefits of a document management solution, organizations need to have an experienced DMS partner who can switch the Sherlock mode on to diagnose their sophisticated requirements and provide customized DMS. It’s no wonder that organizations prefer safer, experienced DMS partners like Extrieve Technologies. Founded by a group of professionals in 1996, Extrieve has been developing software solutions to capture and manage corporate information. Over the years, the company has created its own niche in the industry and we are delighted to share the excerpt of the interview with Extrieve’s management team.

CIO Insider engages in a conversation with Kimman Balakrishnan (Founder & CEO) and Simon Sunny (CBO), Extrieve Technologies. Below are the excerpts.

With digitalization becoming imperative for organizations regardless of the industry, the DMS market continues to grow. The pandemic has been a tailwind as well. The global document management system market is expected to reach $10.17 billion by 2025. As a company which has been a part of the industry since its infancy, where is Extrieve positioned in the industry today? How do you set benchmarks?
Ever since our inception in 1996, we have always been a little distinctive. When we were a pure DMS company, we were one of the few which integrated internally developed capture technologies compared to other companies requiring integration with third party products. When the market became a little unfriendly for small players, we moved into the area of automating back office operations of BFSI. In the aftermath of this move, we built a highly scalable enterprise workflow platform that was available over the Internet. In fact, there are multiple ‘first-time-in-India’ solutions that we have provided over the years.

And now, we have come back to the DMS space with all the knowledge and experience of BFSI automation with respect to everything from scale to productivity, efficiency, reliability, and quick low-risk change management. So, we are on very firm footing today. Our success can also be traced back to the benchmarks that we keep for ourselves. Not only have we ensured that our platform caters to diverse customer requirements in an out-of-the-box manner, but also we have ascertained that the set of features that we offer match the propositions of our competitors not just in the DMS space, but also players in other niche areas as well. Not solely depending on high-end hardware, our solutions can handle very high volume and concurrency even with small hardware, which is also a benchmark that allows us to offer the quality, while maintaining the affordability, and helps our customers exploit products to the fullest.

What is your USP? What has been the mantra that helped your company remain successful over such a long period of time? What do you do differently?
We focus on the user and see what the best way to solve their problem is. In the process, neither do we fear trying-out different ways to solve the problem, nor do we get led by the manner in which others are trying to solve the problem. Other aspects such as scalability, traceability and ease of customization are also our unique propositions; and of course, a conviction that building world-class technologies is possible even by a small company. We also believe that every technology you build must work for a

long time. Some of our codes date back to the 1990s. Taken together, we have built a strong suite of our own IPs that spans the full spectrum of DMS context from capture to extraction, search, and storage. Needless to say, having your own IP provides many benefits.

Your company is well known for your solution PowerFile DMS. What sets this product apart?
PowerFile DMS is a time-tested solution designed to manage the critical and confidential documents. While boasting of an evolution over the last 25 years, PowerFile DMS offers simple and intuitive access to records & information, distributed access to documents, a management process to ensure document correctness & completeness, disaster recovery & long term storage, and multi-level access controls and audit trails, among a plethora of other features. PowerFile's reconcilation process, minimum document validations and checklists ensure completeness of critical document storage, while its storage mechanism is designed to archive objects and not cabinet folder structure. This makes it easy to implement and simple to use; not to mention its high scalability and reliability. Its major use-cases include the management of Audit & Compliance Records, Loans & Account Records, Board Document Repository, Customer KYC & Videos, Contracts & Agreements, and much more.

Powerfile's reconcilation process, minimum document validations and checklists ensure completeness of critical document storage, while its storage mechanism is designed to archive objects and not cabinet folder structure


Tell us about your complete portfolio of solutions. What are the kind of capabilities that we are talking about?
Apart from PowerFile DMS, Extrieve has a strong, comprehensive portfolio of products and tools for Enterprise Content Management requirements. This includes Extrieve Digital Suite and WorkflowWaves. Extrieve Digital Suite helps enterprises to create, process, and store documents in a fast & scalable manner. Since APIs and SDKs can be added to a customer's existing solution, it can solve specific document automation problems. It incorporates a Mobile/Web based Document Capture SDK, which can capture high-quality compressed images without sacrificing the image output quality, helping to save network bandwidth as well as storage. In addition, it also has a centralized template based document generator API/SDK which can help in high volume document generation as well as ensuring brand consistency. Furthermore, other features include a structured and semi-structured data extraction engine and a compression SDK to compress images.

On the other hand, WorkflowWaves is a workflow automation solution engine to configure and manage operational workflows. It is a robust data capture toolset integrated with a workflow management engine that can be configured to support any business process. Designed to be light weight & scalable, it is compliant with information and data security guidelines, and can be deployed on premise as well as cloud infrastructures. Workflow Waves helps enterprises improve productivity by reducing FTNR, automation and ergonomically designed high volume processing interfaces. It helps reduce the operational cost and get higher yields.

Could you share with us a case study pertaining to a recent project, including the before and after scenario?
We had recently migrated one enterprise financial customer from a Major Global DMS product to PowerFile. The customer was facing challenges including cost escalation due to the commercial licensing, scalability & availability challenges, and higher operational TAT due to incomplete implementations. In the aftermath of PowerFile Migration, they were able to significantly reduce OPEX cost due to operational productivity & lower solution cost, and they also started managing higher volumes and concurrency.

Of late, we have also provided our mobile capture SDK to one of the major Fintech companies, which resulted in 80 percent reduction in network transfer and storage requirement.

How would you describe your team? How do you ensure that the clients’ pain areas are understood deeply and customized solutions are offered, rather than selling products?
Our team is trained and groomed to understand that the customer only indicates the kind of pain they face, and we need to comprehend that and the context of their working before devising solutions. They also understand that the customer needs can change frequently, and hence rapid customizability is critical for quick and risk-free change management. Moreover, we are a world-class technology company and they adhere to the quality requirements, and make sure that our employees understand that they are contributing to the development of world class products.

As a debt-free private company, we need not focus on quarterly achievements rather we can work towards a longer term goal. Apart from this process, we directly manage a few major enterprise customers. This also helps us to understand the pain points and potential future requirements.

What’s the future set for Extrieve? What are the areas that you want to invest in?
With respect to DMS and workflows, our focus so far has been on large enterprise implementations. One area we are looking at right now is how to provide such capabilities in a SaaS type of model to smaller organizations. The other area we focus on is to see whether we can monetize some of the technologies that we have developed by providing these as technology components or cloud based APIs. This would cover areas like Image Processing, OCR, Large Volume Content Repository, PDF Generation, and Data Extraction. Another major investment will be on building a partner network.



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