Sandeep Kumar,Product Dossier,Managing Product & Project LifeCycles

ProductDossier was founded in the January of 2006 with a mission to develop and deliver world class Project, Process & Product Lifecycle Management (3PLM) solutions and services to its global customers with a high performance to price ratio. 

 ProductDossier is a privately held company that has over 35 employees and sales presence in USA, United Kingdom and offices in some of the major cities in India, and its Headquarters in Pune.  

 Sandeep Kumar, the  Founder and CEO of ProductDossier holds a Masters in engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

 Our team caught up with him to know more about his ideas that make his business a success.

Tell us about your company?  What are your products and services?

We are an enterprise software product company. We specialise in 3PLM (Project, Process and product management).  We help companies automate business processes across multiple functions like Sales, Engineering, Product Development, QA, HR and Finance etc. As a final outcome of this, our customer experiences higher revenues and profitability, better operational efficiency, optimized resource utilization, improved quality and process compliances. We combine the power of technology and the depth of industry specific knowledge to provide fully configured solutions to our enterprise customers. We cater to multiple verticals including Engineering design & manufacturing, Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC), Life Sciences & consulting organizations.

What would you consider to be the USP of your business? Who are your clients?

 We are one of few enterprise product companies that provide an integrated approach to business process automation. Our solution USP is multi fold:

• Integrated solution for Project, Process & Product Data management
• Integrates well with existing IT landscape like SAP, Oracle, MS Office, Email etc
• Highly configurable as opposed to only customizable
• Short implementation time (4-12 weeks)
• Successful implementation track record

We provide services to Tata Technologies, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), Bilcare, Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), ThyssenKrupp, Defence Research Development Laboratory (DRDL) and Eicher Engineering to name a few.

Was there any reason why you chose to be in this line of business?

I started my career in the Indian IT industry. While travelling across the US and Europe, I got inspired by product companies like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP etc, and the idea of creating a Product Company came around. We chose this particular space for two reasons, we have a fair knowledge about it and partly because of the opportunity this space offered.

 How did the name come about? And your logo is interesting. Why this design?

‘Dossier’ is a French word for ‘Folder’. Our vision was to manage all products or project information in a folder like structure and make it available to the right people at the right time. This led to the name ‘ProductDossier’.

We designed the logo keeping a few aspects in mind. We wanted our logo to reflect our partner approach with our customers and if you notice our logo is a 2 piece puzzle, (designed to denote customer problems and pain points) being collectively solved by us and our customer. We’ve also used light blue and earthy yellow colours in the logo that denotes the sky and ground. The idea being that it always reminds us of our sky high aims with our feet firmly on ground.

 Can you describe an innovative idea that you executed in your business?

 I believe that we are innovating on a day to day basis, be it the use of technology to solve a business problem, ease of use of technology, or perhaps on the cost of use of technology. I can recall an incident where we had a customer with offices in multiple locations and uploading the documents from each location to the centralized vault was taking time for the users who were away from the centralized vault. To tackle this, we created localized vault that helped speed up the performance and yet allowed users to stay connected to the centralized database. And we further innovated on this by using this solution for the security purpose as well as now the important documents and drawings are stored locally and provided a much needed security of said artifacts.  Needless to say, we had a very happy customer!

Did you avail any funds for your business – debt or equity?

 Yes, we have had angel funding about two years ago. Our angels include professionals, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in India and in the US. I believe that there are always options available for the right business proposals if presented in the right manner.

We also have employees holding certain equity in the company. The benchmark for us in this particular aspect would be Infosys and we would strive to create an institution and share wealth with other contributors in the company.

Do you allow your employees to experiment in their work?

As I mentioned earlier, our business is based on the new and innovative ideas to solve business problems and then to execute those ideas in a speedy manner. Lot of our success depends upon continuous work on the initial idea to develop much superior feature/product. It is all about experiment, innovation & teamwork. Without this, we would not have achieved the success we have so far!

 What are your future plans for the current business? Are you planning to start any new venture or new line of business?

We will continue to focus on our existing business, acquiring new customers and help our customers realize their growth and profitability targets. We do intend to add to our product portfolio in line with the new challenges faced by our customers. Also being a product company, we will grow our business from one market to another market and from one vertical to a new vertical. We just added Life Sciences vertical and we are seeing excellent traction. We already added 2 new customers in this spaces in the last 3 months. We are also looking at more sales & marketing investments in superior markets outside of India and you will hear more on this in the near future. Our strategy is to attain one of the top one of three position within a market/vertical and move to the next new market/vertical.

Can you share some best practices that you adopt in your company?

 We are a product company and it is expected from us that we will create the world class products. However We also focus on providing the best after sales service of our product. We are very responsive and try and meet our timelines in all aspects of our business. We realize that’s it takes very little financial resources and just an attitude thing & this becomes a customer delight. Another thing we do is clearly benchmark our thought process with the very best out there though we may be much smaller in size .This becomes a great asset for us in creating differentiation for our external customers and excellent motivation tool for our employees.

What inspired you to take the entrepreneurial route? Did you need to convince your family when you wanted to start your own venture?

 I think it was the entrepreneurial boom in our country and specially the success of Infosys and Mr. Narayan Murthy in particular. That middle class boy image of Mr. Murthy gave credibility to the whole concept of starting up. Since none of our family is into business, I guess none of us were aware of the intricacies of it. I call it the power of ignorance.

What uncertainties did you encounter during your journey and how did you tackle them?

There were plenty of them and now I firmly believe that you face them all the time. Over a period of time, your own resource (financial and otherwise) grows and also ability to handle them grows with each passing day. After a while I realized, in any adversity, the most important thing was to stick around and it shall pass too.

According to you, which is that one thing which is essential for success as an entrepreneur?

Well I am sure there is always a combination and it also depends upon the nature of the business. I would say that a Team is very essential for the success of the business like ours. Importantly you need a team at every level. Today investors wants to invest in best teams & not necessarily the best idea, customers wants to work with best team and not necessarily the best product & so on.

Do you think people without any work experience can make good businessmen?

There are no rules and we have success and failures from all rules and exceptions. Work experience gives you industry contacts, teaches you how the industry operates etc. All these things can be acquired as well. I personally think that it is good to start businesses with certain critical mass already built in. That way scaling up happens quickly.

What advice would you like to give to youngsters who want to take the plunge into entrepreneurism?

I would say welcome to the world of entrepreneurism. It’s an exciting world where learning never stops. You will be surprised by the endless challenges and your own ability to overcome them.

 Do you have any special incident that made you grow as an entrepreneur?

 There is no such single incident which had a significant effect. We have learnt from the ups and downs we faced. I recall and an incident when we bagged our first large customer having locations across continents and our license value crossed $250,000. Then there was another incident when our customer abandoned the order due to some of  his own internal issues.

If I were to point out the transforming events, I would say it is our engagements with some of our large customers. We learned a lot in terms of quality, schedules, delivery, support and so much more. Each one of those customers made us improve our efficiency by few basis points. I think that’s huge contribution to our success.

Who is your role model and why?

 I have lots. I like the way Mr. Ratan Tata thought of doing a Nano for INR 1,00,000 because he saw family getting wet on a bike during the rains. That was a very powerful thought and then he got it done. Power of thought & sharing

I also admire Narayan Murthy for making middle class people like us believe that they can also create something big and how he made several millionaires out of Infosys including his support staff.

I am very inspired by the fact as to how Bill Gates is giving away his millions to far away people to eradicate poverty and diseases (Power of Giving). I would be very happy if I can imbibe some of these qualities in myself and do my own bit..

What motto do you live by?

Positivity is a great thing and can do wonders for you. It only demands patience and persistence. Just do the right things and everything else will follow sooner or later!

An active sportsman, in his free time, you would find Sandeep relaxing with a favourite book or just relaxing with his family and friends. He has also started running for marathons and on a Sunday morning you would see him go for his practice run at the Pune University.

To know more about the products and services, ProductDossier has to offer, please visit http://www.productdossier.com/

SMEstory helps SMEs to bring out their stories and their journey to the world. It is a stepping stone that can motivate the employees, the customers, the vendors and anybody connected to the company. If you would like your company to get featured on this platform send us a mail at story@smejoinup.com

If you are a SME owner and want to be part of our SME JOINUP network do sign up on www.smejoinup.com