Srijan Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

The Record Xchange offers a web based platform that allows attorneys in the legal community who need access to court reporting services and transcripts from proceedings to be matched up with producers of those services - either court reporters or transcription firms who can produce transcripts for them.

I am the Chief Executive Officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Srijan Technologies?

We contracted with them at a time when the current owners of Record Xchange owned a court reporting and transcription firm in Phoenix. We were providing transcription services for court jurisdictions around the country. All the transcription was performed by homebased workers. So we had a requirement to move digital audio recordings to servers that we would allocate for download by people at home to transcribe. They would upload their finished transcripts. We would compile and then deliver finished transcripts to the client. It was heavily email based originally. For the digital audio files we had FTP sites. The workflows around that were very manual. So when I took over the business in the mid-2000s, we wanted to automate projects and develop a workflow around the acquisition of digital content and then distribution of work.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

I came out of the software development industry. I was stepping more into a service based business and didn’t have a software development team. We contracted with a local Phoenix firm, which was a difficult project for us that did not go well. We made a decision to build it using Drupal. We got that project launched and it was held together by duct tape and baling wire. It was a fragile solution. Because we used Drupal, I wanted to stay with that, but I had to get the solution fixed as quickly as possible. The first project we did was a salvage project. They took the solution that we had deployed. It was a four or five month project to re-architect key components of it. They did leave some of the old code but they supported it with additional code where it was needed. We considered that a very successful project. They did it in a timely manner and at a reasonable price.

How did you come to work with Srijan Technologies?

I looked for firms in the US and briefly contracted with one out of Canada that we decided we didn’t like. We ended up finding Srijan in India. That was after interviewing five firms out of India that were Drupal based. I had an employee who was Indian. I had hired him out of the university and he wanted to stay in the US. I had hired him as an intern and he was going for an H1B [non-immigrant work visa] which we were able to get for him. When we ran into the problem, we decided maybe he should go to India and direct an effort to recruit. Through web searches, we identified close to 20 firms throughout India. I moved him back to India for six months to do this. During that time, we whittled those 20 down to 8 which we thought would possibly work for us. We did that through telephone and email exchanges. He interviewed 8. Then we shortlisted it to 3. I interviewed all 3 extensively.

How much have you invested with Srijan Technologies?

The initial salvage project was $75,000. After that, the company shifted focus. We brought in some outside investment. We decided we were going to take this solution that had been built internally and turn it into a real platform. We were going to step out of the service business and create a platform to service the entire market. In 2014 we reengaged them to build the platform. That was $250,000 to $300,000 per year. We sustained that for a couple of years.

What is the status of this engagement?

The first project was in 2013. The maintenance is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The foundation of our relationship is the best [example]. The initial project was the most difficult. Their professional approach and speed is great. We were over a barrel, and some firms might have taken advantage of that. They came in ahead of schedule and under budget, and they made reasonable recommendations. They could have recommended a lot more work for themselves. They were very judicious in their analysis. 

How did Srijan Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re Agile. They have people that are coaches, and they do a good job. They keep a disciplined approach which is scrum based Agile. They have a good variety of experience and skill within the organization. They have extremely experienced scrum masters that could participate. If it’s a smaller project, they’ll put on a less experienced one. They charge appropriately for that. They’ve applied really high level Agile coaches and experiences overseeing the scrum masters.

What did you find most impressive about Srijan Technologies?

They’ve been very flexible with us. Many firms find it difficult to work with a startup. We go through phases where it’s very intense to get something launched and we can’t spend money. They’re big enough that they can manage through working with our challenges.

Are there any areas Srijan Technologies could improve?

Their Drupal expertise is really good. There are times I think it permeates the discussion a little too much. There are times I want to ask if we are doing the right thing with using Drupal.

As Srijan brings people on, they’re trying to bring people on with really good English skills. You have meetings where you have a developer who’s trying to say something important and you can’t quite understand what he’s trying to say. So it has to be translated. So our overhead is a little higher.