Process innovations @ Panther Nails

In the 8 years long journey, process refinement has been our bread and butter. Panther Nails have aced at observing the process, finding the loopholes and providing better solutions around it.

Integrating external API

Integrating an external API into your system seems very legit and obvious where most of the things are available as API. While looking at it from the integration perspective, we think about the handshake, the give and take between the two communicating systems and the end result. But in reality, there are many other things to keep in mind and need to consider before integrating any API with your software ecosystem.

With one of our customers, we had requirement of integrating an external payment disbursement solution to all of their 70,000+ end users across India. Paytm and Cashfree were their choice to be the external disbursement solution provider. After The initial phase of subscribing to their service, we have been handed over the Keys and API documentation with the expectations that everything will work as designed. In actual working scenario, the issue can be from 1) service providers side, where the request has not been sent properly, or 2) from the internet connection issue where we have sent the request to pay-out but lost the acknowledgement in transmission due to network, or 3) can be some legit issue where the account is incorrect or not present.

Considering all possible outcomes and workflows, I have designed the integration system which is now processing more than 100 transactions a day which values around 40K to 50K. As a result, the system is now processing 1 Crore Rupees cumulatively at the end of the month without any need to monitor it. The main approach was to dodge the errors and error prone scenarios making the process more rigid and independent of the foreign API provider.

Lite Apps Ideology

In this competitive world, keeping your check on your customers requirement and also keep up the pace with the trending technologies is a must. Many customers have some legacy products or services which they are already using since long time, but they want to have some improvement in conjunction with the existing system. Also, many times the issue with hosting, cloud storage, security, reliability, availability are the concerns with the new system which also affects the pricing of new solution.

Time Office Lite was an idea came out in the pandemic situation of COVID-19, where we served our customers with minimal resource requirements from either end. The customer was already having an attendance system which was recording in and out of employees using a thumb based biometric device. What we provided was a mobile app, capable of identifying faces and recording the time in an excel sheet which is available online. Very simple. Isn’t it? The idea behind keeping it simple was to focus on the primary requirement of reducing human contact with the system and providing a reliable easy to access, low cost solution.

The data storage with clients own account helped us to decentralize the system backend which in turn has increased the security and accessibility for the end user. Removing the backend, reduced the cost drastically and made that light weight and easy to integrate with any other system.

Extending Microsoft 365 Suite

Being an innovator, observation has been one of my old habit. Keeping up to date with the contemporary trends and technologies, we had adopted Microsoft Office 365 suite at early stage. Microsoft Excel add-in, Microsoft Office add-in are in our quiver since long time.

I have observed that at least 60% of enterprises in India have Microsoft Office 365 E3 or E5 License, and what they use out of it is Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint only. The suite has some other featured applications which only up to 5% of enterprises are utilizing. Applications such as Teams Bespoke APP, Power BI, Power APP, Power Automate are not utilized at all.

There was a client who was using our application to keep track of all the activities on the floor. The floor manager used to get the report at the end of the day and fill in some other manual details and send it to Vertical Head. The Vertical head had such 7 plants under him which used to report him daily, his job was to consolidate all reports extract important points with some predefined metrics and summarize the report and send if further in the chain. This whole process was of about 3–5 hours long.

We observed this and suggested to reduce this manual job collection, conciliation and summarization of reports. We made The Power Automate to observe defined OneDrive location where the floor manager would put the report. All such reports from various locations will be picked up, processed and summarized automatically and a dashboard designed with Power Apps which was integrated with Microsoft Teams app which was easy, handy tool already installed at all hierarchical levels.