Planvisage Company Profile and Founder Interview

Posted by Tom Blue on June 3, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

Pari Annamalai is an American that is now living in Singapore. His company, Planvisage, provides supply chain solutions… Here is our interview below.

1. What do you do?

Planvisage is a Supply Chain Solutions Company. We provide both software and services to companies including outsourced planning services for small and medium sized (SMEs) businesses all over the world.

2. Who are your competitors?

Not to sound funny but our biggest competitors are Microsoft Excel or manual processes. We compete with other companies that do Production Planning, Production Scheduling, Demand Planning and Replenishment Planning for SMEs. This market is highly fragmented with no real global player. There are big players like SAP with APO, Oracle with APS, i2 and JDA Manugistics but they focus on larger manufacturing companies so we really do not consider them our competition.

3. What makes you different than your competitors?

Our product is very graphical things like our BOM Diagram and our Gnatt Based Planning board are all very unique to our solution. We also offer functionality that is important to SMEs that are only found in the larger systems but the cost of these systems can be many times higher. Our total cost of ownership is very low because of the following reasons:
a. Our products are based on a proprietary heuristic algorithm rather than optimization algorithms which increases the need for hardware.
b. The products are build on standard proven MS .net framework and standard databases like SQL, DB2 and Oracle. This insures availability of long term support and reduced costs.
c. Implementation times are 25% of the time of larger systems which insures up front investments are low. Typically we can implement our modules in less than one month.
d. No special administrators or support staff required to maintain the system. The users are able to maintain the system and make the needed changes as required.

4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?

Our biggest challenge is the overall economy has affected most of our customers worldwide but the companies that have used this time to invest in such solutions have seen paybacks of as little as one quarter on their investment. They have seen tremendous cash savings from inventory reductions, utilization of capacity more efficiently, better alignment of supply and demand which has meant lower obsolescence and inventory carrying costs and overall reduction in planning and production cycle times. In one of customers they saw a payback at one of their four factories of less than six weeks. Planvisage has also received in the past year four awards from customers and independent institutions. So getting the word out that this is truly an investment has been one of our biggest challenges.

5. How long have you been in business?

We have been in business since Jan 2004.

6. How many employees do you have?

We have about 21 employees and three partners. Our employees are equally disbursed in development and consulting. We also have a half dozen distribution partners throughout the world. We are also Microsoft, IBM and Intel ISV partners.

7. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?

We expect this year to be similar revenues to last year which is about $1,000,000.

8. Are you profitable?

We expect in 2009 to be breakeven but we have been profitable from 2004 to 2007 and have substantial cash reserves from these years. These cash reserves are in excess of one years working capital requirements.