Adrenaline eSystems was established over 20 years ago to provide technology solutions to help firms in human resource management. talking to Hindu, MD & CEO Srinivas Bharti said the company was a leader in this area and has since taken its product to the cloud, expanding beyond India into West Asia and Asia-Pacific, while continuously adapting the product to new technology such as analytics. Upgraded with. and mobile technology. now ₹5 The 0 crore company, which is part of Intellect Group, aims to double revenue in three years. Part:
You recently said that you are aiming to double the revenue to ₹100 crore in three years. If it took you 20 years to reach your first ₹50 crore, what is it about the market that gives you confidence?
User companies have made significant investments in the HR technology sector in India and globally in recent times. It has been unprecedented in the last two years. Even in mature markets like the US, the middle market is now on the rise. And in markets like India which initially started with operational HR and then moved to strategic HR areas, the pandemic has accelerated certain things – be it management learning or employee engagement. Because of the hybrid model, people are working from anywhere, companies are looking for ways to connect them. Recruitment is also happening ‘from somewhere’. If you look at our own pace of sign-ups from customers, we have the highest billing ever in a quarter. Last year, we signed up over 75 new customers. Pre-pandemic, it used to be 35-40 or so.
But then it’s also a matter of resizing clients. What is happening now is that even smaller companies are looking to digitize. Earlier, you only had over 10,000 employee organizations opting to digitize HR. Today we are seeing traction in companies that have 2,000-5,000 employees. Companies expecting growth also want such solutions, as they may be 1,000-2,000 today, but aim to reach 10,000-50,000 in 4-5 years. I think this is also the optimism that is all around in terms of sustainable development in India. We see that confidence.
Improvements in our marketing engine and the investments we have made in digital marketing have also helped in connecting the leading pipeline in India. We see that customers who left us for new age start-ups keep coming back to us. And the traction is not only in India but also in the Middle East.
In terms of digitization, first, HR Tech was almost last in priority. Organizations preferred the accounting system to go digital first, then came the business system. Automation specific to businesses followed them. If you are a manufacturing company, production planning was needed to better manage capacity; Then, in order to better manage deliveries, logistics solutions became popular. Salesforce automation helped popularize CRM. Later, if they had the budget left, companies would say ‘now let’s enable our employees’, bringing them into HR tech. The pandemic accelerated all of that. We see traction in every type of company, not just in IT or BPO. Even in construction companies, for example, employees have to work outside the office, so they [companies] Had to process payroll no matter where they are [the staff] sat. He had to make sure that talent was not going away. And so he had to join them. Otherwise, it meant lots of phone calls and saying, for example, ‘No, my vacation count is wrong’, etc.
Has the pandemic changed your sales process?
What I anticipate will pick up pace in the industry — and we’ve started to do that over the past two quarters — is that for user firms with fewer than 500 employees, for example, where HR maturity may not , or perhaps there is a human resource manager who he/she may also be on contract sometimes, we will not necessarily need to go through the traditional process. That is, to meet with the customer, set a schedule for a demo, conduct the demo in-person, etc. You actually generate leads digitally, and then do an online demo or session. You can then convert them to the client as it is in the cloud anyway, experienced on the cloud. The movement to a full software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, where you find yourself signing up for a trial and then expected to convert online, is still some way off in the HR space. However, some vendors are offering the service.
Your website talks about processing 4 million monthly payslips for 700 customers. Are all your customers on a pay-per-use model?
Typically, premises have a license-plus model. But, in India, we are now completely on the cloud. You would simply call it the rental model. Only in the Middle East do we see a lot of customers, even multinational companies operating there, preferring systems on their premises.
How many of your customers are India-based?
Five hundred
Has your data analytics offering helped provide customers with insights they’ve never had before? any example?
Leverage is an example. This is an area where CEOs want to minimize and where finer detail helps. For example, in our industry, product innovation and implementation is a difficult skill to develop overnight. But if an IT company looks at attrition as a whole, it’s easy to get lost with a one-size-fits-all approach.
Between 2010 and now, how has the use of technology changed the number of HR employees required to serve a firm of 1,000 people?
With HR Tech Platform, you will need 60-70% less HR staff. We generally divide HR between Operational HR and Strategic HR. Operational HR is transactional HR – Recruitment is one example. Earlier, you used to have one HR recruiter for every department in a big IT company. In other industries, you had the sales team recruiter, then the back-office team recruiter, everyone had different responsibilities. Today, the recruitment process itself has gone digital. For example, we have introduced what is called Candidate Portal – vacancies held by Line Managers are automatically published on their website for candidates to view and apply. immediately. So, we’ve put an end to that effort. Other transactional aspects of HR are managing leave, attendance, payroll etc. There too, you just handle exceptions – where you see that the application hasn’t been made for a day or two, the HR person contacts the employee asking if they want to regularize attendance.
The strategic HR part is where you may need a person who understands the area of performance management, talent management, succession planning, career planning and so on. We have introduced learning module with partner. Let’s say for a specific combination of performance, competency, job role… the system automatically curates content and provides you with learning modules that can help you improve your performance. Earlier, you needed a learning and development specialist who would look into it all, try to do the mapping, nab the partners for the material, etc. You can have an HR person who will handle all this. [for the whole company], I find that 70% savings on headcount are easily seen for mid-sized firms and above. Firms with a strength of 500-2000 employees are classified as medium sized.