The problem
Construction runs on paper, phone calls, and trust. At Vishwa Samudra Engineering — a 10,000+ employee conglomerate — approvals took weeks, material pilferage hid inside the industry’s accepted ~1% “unaccounted expenses” (about ₹1 crore a month on ₹100 crore of bulk procurement), quality had no real-time feedback, and site accidents were rising as the company scaled. I knew none of this domain when I started.
What I did
Earned scope with the boring work first. Started part-time, mapping offline processes to an org-wide ERP for procurement, contracts, accounting, and finance. Approvals went from weeks to days; weekly issues dropped from 22 to 3; resolution time from 3 days to 1; ₹400+ crore of monthly purchase and work orders flowed through the system. That earned the mandate — and a team of 10 (2 APMs, 4 BAs, 2 analysts, run on OKRs) — to go after the sites.
Set a four-part product strategy. Bridge the site-to-head-office gap; build in-house for material, quality, and safety while integrating external tools for progress tracking; unify everything in one insights platform; keep ERP for accounting and admin only.
Built the site suite 0→1, for non-technical field users. TrackZ (material): weighbridge-verified tracking covering 40% of all material received across projects. KwartZ (quality): 100+ lab test types and site inspections digitised — 15,000+ lab tests and 4,000+ inspections reviewed, result-calculation time down from 30 minutes to 3, real-time alerts to the chief quality controller. Safety Eye (safety): QR-based issue reporting plus trainings, checklists, and drills — 2,100+ issues resolved, resolution down from 25 days to 5. BeatZ (security): patrolling, material movement, incident and SOS reporting. WingZ (shutters): utilization tracking for shuttering material. On top: PowerBI dashboards and a Command Control Center — an industry-first real-time intervention system giving head office live control over site issues.
The impact
$11.5M in quarterly operations digitised, incidents below 10 a quarter, and site fatalities down to zero. The honest footnote: site-team adoption was a constant grind, and external developers’ estimation habits tested every timeline — building the culture was harder than building the software.
What this says about how I work
No data, no domain knowledge, no digital culture — strategy still has to come from somewhere. Mine came from walking the sites, quantifying the leaks, and sequencing trust: fix the head office first, and the sites let you in.