How Obese is Your Company? Get a Lipid Check With Colimetrics
Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all
This is the Gilb Measurability Principle; the mantra that Colimetrics abides by. Colimetrics Software Products automate the measurement of human factors that impact organizational efficiency.
Use Case: If your organization has multiple departments and a process has to go via most of them; lots of emails are exchanged. And when this happens, delays are bound to happen. So, what is the roadblock? Where is the delay happening?
A very new concept for the Indian ecosystem, Colimetrics aims to provide solutions to companies to improve efficiency. “For smaller organizations, the impact of human factors on efficiency is low as there is great visibility into what each person is doing. As companies start to grow, productivity inefficiencies start to creep in. Problems such as bottlenecks, bureaucracy, incorrect division of work, miscommunication of priorities etc. bring down the efficiency,” says co-founder Pankaj Kulkarni about the kind of problems Colimetrics aims to solve.
With first-hand experience of facing these problems in organizations of different sizes, Pankaj Kulkarni and Phaniraj Raghavendra along with hacker Rakesh Gopal came together to start this company. This formidable core team will address the problems of organizational inefficiency. According to Pankaj, if a company is small, there is direct visibility in terms of what each employee is doing. Hence, the effects of human factors on the work efficiency is not so high as it is in medium to large companies, where bureaucracy, incorrect division of labour and differentiation in priorities leads to overall inefficiency.What is the lipid all about? Analogy to the Human Body
“To give a high level sketch, I’ll use the metaphor of the human body. We can imagine the senior management of a company to be the brain and the “real workers” (leaf-nodes in an organization chart i.e. those who don’t have any ‘reportees’ e.g. salespersons, engineers) to be the hands and legs. Lipid tends to accumulate in the middle. As soon as layers of middle management start to form, companies start to become sluggish. In spite of having the best brains and arms, they are slowed down by the lipid. The analogy with the human body stops at this point.” explains Pankaj.
The lipid of the human body can be easily measured but the lipid of a company is difficult to identify since human factors are involved and it is difficult to quantitatively measure the productivity of middle management. “Personal likes and dislikes, prejudices, work load, mismatch in priorities, selective bottlenecks, misalignment of individual and company goals are potential causes, but difficult to identify. However, in companies that use software tools for their operations, we can gather a lot of information about the lipid by analyzing the data from these internal systems. Given the various factors involved, clearly we cannot derive a 100% correlation, but we can have objective data to aid decision making.” he adds.
The Target Market and Challenge
“Our target market is medium to large companies that use Software systems for their internal operations. Characteristics of these companies would be 100+ employees, offices in multiple geographies and having a depth of 4 or more in their organization tree.” Informs Pankaj.
Not being an urgent pain point, the biggest challenge Colimetrics will face is to get Indian companies adopt their solution. “Similar to our take on preventive measures for our human body, the companies feel the same about the organizational lipid concept. Just as we wait till we have to rush for a by-pass surgery; only in deep troubles, the companies go for consulting firms like McKinsey, rather than keeping a regular check and control on the lipid to avoid disrupting the company.” Explains Pankaj.
A very nascent company yet, Colimetrics has an interesting idea at hand and is looking for early adopters. We’ll have a close eye on their diet, so stay tuned!
