Spotlight

Climbing the SCM ladder

After making its presence felt in the SCM space, TAKE Solutions is targeting verticals such as retail and engineering for strategic growth, says Vinutha V

Sridharan Sivan Managing Director TAKE Solutions

Within the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) space, SCM (Supply Chain Management) is taking centre stage as it forms an eco-system to connect all the external entities in a business set-up. H R Srinivasan, former Managing Director of Sembcorp, felt a need to address the pain points in SCM and founded a company, TAKE Solutions in 2001 at Chennai. The company has always remained deep-domain-oriented by focussing only on SCM. TAKE Solutions came out with TAKE RTE (Real Time Enterprise Enabler) as its flagship product, a framework combining BPM (Business Process Management), workflow management & applications and information integration. Developed on the Microsoft .Net platform, it provides a composite application development environment.

During the first two years, the company developed warehouse, procurement and distribution management solutions. It was in 2003 that they saw customer traction especially in the FMCG space—Britannia, Parle, MTR and Medimix to name a few. “There was a plethora of execution tools within the SCM space. However, there was also a dearth of collaborative framework tools and we aimed to fill this gap by developing such tools,” says Sridharan Sivan, Managing Director, TAKE Solutions. TAKE RTE framework enabled the company to be successful in verticals such as FMCG, retail, and food and beverages.

Acquisitions aid growth

In 2004, TAKE Solutions decided to tap the life sciences market by acquiring various companies in this space. It is challenging to keep up with emerging business needs and technologies. Information exchange is a constant happening across verticals and organisations are looking at cutting edge SCM solutions that give an information flow at the right speed and right place. “We thought acquiring companies can add value while tackling the challenges we encounter in the SCM space. Acquisitions in the life sciences area helped us in obtaining people, domain knowledge and local market access,” he adds. In order to enter the clinical intelligence market, TAKE Solutions bought an US-based firm, clinMetrics for $3 million in 2004. With this acquisition, TAKE RTE will enable clinMetrics to develop analytical products for the pharmaceutical industry. The immediate benefit for pharmaceutical customers will be regulatory compliance by timely and accurate reporting, risk mitigation, simplification and automation of processes, enforcement of best practices, increase in productivity and quality. The product suite will allow decision-makers and key stakeholders with timely and valuable metrics. Recently, TAKE Solutions acquired two US-based companies— OnSphere Corporation, a Web-based pharmaceutical solutions provider, and Applied Clinical Intelligence (ACI), a clinical research solutions provider. The acquisition of OnSphere was for a sum of $2.75 million and will help TAKE Solutions to enhance its FDA (Food and Drug Administration) compliant Document Management Systems complementary to TAKE’s current product offerings—SubmitSPL and Submit-eCTD. The incorporation of ACI into TAKE Solutions for a sum of $2.4 million, will strengthen the company’s clinical data management, analysis and reporting capabilities and enable it build on products like safety data marts, safety dashboards and clinical data marts.

Focussing on life sciences

Animal testing, clinical trials, FDA compliance and tracking the market once a product is out generate a huge amount of data in a life sciences company. Watching for the drug performance and attesting to the quality of drugs is compelling pharmaceutical companies to put sophisticated SCM solutions in place. “There is a constant need for pharmaceutical companies to integrate with CROs (Clinical Research Organisations) and FDAs. The data generated in the integration has to be maintained in the form of collaborative data and analytical reports. We feel this area to be a huge opportunity to tap using our collaborative tools,” says Sivan. TAKE Solutions has acquired pharmaceutical clients such as Aurobindo, Dabur and Pfizer. Since life sciences is a niche space, TAKE Solutions has identified the need of bio-pharmaceutical companies to achieve Structured Product Labelling (SPL) compliance requirements, in accordance with FDA norms. The company recently launched an electronic product labelling solution called SubmitSPL, which will help bio-pharmaceutical companies to achieve immediate SPL compliance requirements efficiently and cost-effectively. This will also shorten the time taken by the companies for submission of market applications. “Our SubmitSPL addresses all the formats and documents needed for the FDA compliance and this will pave the way for us to tap the hidden potential in the life sciences market,” he adds. With the launch of SubmitSPL, TAKE Solutions is now making a foray in the Content Supply Chain domain. This way the company enables the organisations, which are committed to developing strategies, to improve control over the entire labelling content supply chain.

Future in real-time SCM

After the acquisitions, TAKE Solutions has been growing rapidly. Though the final numbers are yet to be announced, the company is believed to have doubled its revenues for 2005-06 from $10 million in 2004-05. Currently, the company has expertise in FMCG, and food and beverage industries and it aims to take its SCM skills to newer verticals such as retail, engineering and automotive. By leveraging on the company’s strengths in products, people and geographical expansions, TAKE has drawn a line of plan for the near future. TAKE Solutions is also planning to adopt technologies such as RFID and handheld transactions. The track and trace space in logistics is also another area in which the company wants to make forays. “We see a bright future in all the areas we operate in. In the life sciences space, all companies are expected to trace the product right from the manufacturing plant up to reaching end-customers. We plan to pay attention to this area. In case of automotive and engineering, the skill sets required are slightly different and we are confident of targeting these verticals,” explains Sivan.

TAKE has tied up with visionary groups to identify the emerging trends in SCM and it believes that real-time SCM solutions in Wi-Fi and RFID hold potential for the future. The company is also looking at e-Governance. Recently, it completed two e-Governance projects in property management in Malaysia and an e-registration project in the UK.

From a mere 30 employees in 2001, the company has increased to 500 employees. Out of them over 350 are working in its Indian development centre and, sales and marketing operations.