Ramco pins its hopes on defence, aviation biz

"We have signed two deals in the drone segment and one in the flying taxi side,” says Virender Aggarwal, CEO, Ramco Systems, who has been building the innovation blocks at the company, after taking charge in 2012. From making its solutions available to customers across 35 countries, it has made a headway in the aviation business segment. The progress it has seen in this sector has “opened up a burgeoning segment – Drones and Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Ramco, which is gaining traction in both the commercial and defense spaces.” Competition, he says, is a significant differentiator as the company now caters to seven of the top ten helicopter operations. It has also penetrated the US Defence sphere by bagging big ticket deals in a consistent manner.

The enquiries for drone use cases, for delivery of packages has been on a high, crossing one million mark. This has led to the spawning of 500 to 1,000 air taxi companies enabling Ramco to explore the potential of e-vertical business opportunities. It is also working on virtual reality, rolling out training modules in aviation, making it possible to get “hands-on” skilling experience of aircraft engine from remote locations, conduct diagnostics and boost efficiency to 52 per cent. Backed by a team of technologists, Aggarwal showcases to DTNext, the entire gamut of solutions that include enhancing the employee experience.

Be it a simple payroll task or complex tax computations, Ramco offers an array of services, that have expanded the scope of the HR function delivery to be more efficient and robust. Conversation with robots is no longer a one-off thing, as the HR and payroll product is driven 95 per cent by bots, he says, noting that aviation, ERP and logistics are some of the key sectors, that have brought marquee clients into its fold. Timesheets to facial recognition for attendance, Ramco’s solutions are yielding good results as the language spread includes Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian and Chinese. ‘Chia’, Ramco’s flagship AI driven virtual assistant, delivers 35 plus capabilities from Day 1, he adds.

Such use of technology has improved efficiency as the Ramco team claims that a reduction of about 14 hours has been possible with regard to payroll-related queries. Interestingly, the chatbots or conversational AI that its customers started using four and half years ago has seen good traction, with 12 million chats taking place on the system. That it is platform-agnostic has worked well as helpdesk has become redundant, given the increasingly popular use of applications such as FB messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Team, Weibo. Self-explaining pay slips is one of the 25 other functions inbuilt in the bot solutions, and external resources too can leverage them.

“Capturing personal details to rolling out offer letter and using bots to conduct first level interviews to shortlist candidates, explains the range of possibilities that an AI or machine language solution is able to provide,” Aggarwal says, as he goes on to cite an example of an Amazon driver getting fired by a bot. Internally, it has opted for audio and touchless functions over facial recognition technology as the leader believes the latter has become ‘out of fashion’ apart from the fact that asynchronous calling has been catching up. During the pandemic, around 100 top executives took a 25 per cent salary cut and though survival plan was the focus, savings from non-travel has been $500,000 a month.

“We have been able to do an annual saving of about $6 million, besides erasing a debt of Rs 100 crore,” signs off Aggarwal, as he seeks to highlight the digital ecosystem of the company, at a time when marketing expenses have nosedived.