Remembering M.S.S.R

A Dharmic Life

Innovation

The Customers’ business areas include Manufacturing, Trading, Financing, Medical Care, Education, Forestry, Tea Estates, Communications, etc., The customers are both from Public and Private Sectors. Some of the projects were developed for the prestigious and successful World Bank assisted Social Welfare Projects. Here is an overview of all the different types of software projects that were handled by MSSR:

 

Statistical Models

All statistical variables were programmed to automatically calculate their values.

Forecasting

MSSR developed models implementing the forecasting methods. These were ahead of the times as they were developed when the rest of the software development firms were still working on commercial applications like Pay Roll, Financial Accounting and Inventory.

Project Monitoring

MSSR developed models to use the Project Management concepts. And to showcase it effectively, they were used in many management development programs that he himself conducted.

Self Learning Tutorials

This was one of his pet topics. He designed a generic online education system. He designed it in such a way that any learning material could be used with it.  This like the other academic software that he researched and developed was ahead of the times of online universities.

Financial Accounting

This was one of his favorite systems. This application was developed in all the platforms that were available during his time. In each design, he would introduce new concepts, more controls and better outputs. This system was highly appreciated by the users as well as the management. As the Finance is the integral part of all other functional areas of any organization, he believed in the integration of the other systems with this system. When people were manually entering vouchers related to other functional areas, he implemented the automatic generation of vouchers from the other systems. He believed that the best place to generate a voucher is when the basic operation takes place. This would avoid mistakes and reduce duplicate work. One should appreciate the fact that he did all these with an Engineering background. Accountants in many organizations strongly believed that he is a qualified and experienced accountant seeing his immense knowledge in the subject.

In group of companies, he designed automatic procedures to combine the data from all the companies and generate the reports. This was even done with branches situated in remote places. The data capture was done automatically with just a dial-up-connection, when people were just talking about Intranet and sharing of data across different locations.

Asset Information and Accounting

MSSR was one of the pioneers in developing software application for this area. One of his Customers had more than 100 branches and challenge was that there would be many additions, transfers and sale of assets in all these branches. All these transactions were carefully captured and the reconciliations were done very easily with his system. This was done when the PCs had only Floppy drives and no Hard Disks. The Chartered Accountant of that Organization commented ‘the output is from MSSR. So, there is no need for me to cross verify’

Inventory Management

Unlike Financial Accounting, Inventory Management had many variations across different Organizations. He effectively managed the development by carefully designing the document handling procedure and strict controls. Many Organizations were benefited by his suggestions on the improvements in the manual procedures.

Production Planning and Control

Being an Industrial Engineer, he had designed interesting systems in this area. He would understand the complex Production processes very easily and design the system to help the Customer.

Customer Order Processing

At the time when most of the customer orders were still being manually written, MSSR introduced a concept wherein the orders could be generated by the system automatically.

 Human Resource Information and Development

The system that was designed & implemented by MSSR, took care of all the operations of the HR department. In two major Organizations where thousands of employees were working, this system was successfully implemented. With that implementation it became possible for the HR department operations to be managed by just two junior level staff and the HR manager.

Pay Roll

Like Accounting, this was one of his favorite systems. Control was the key factor that he used in designing Pay Roll applications. Automatic journals generated to accounting department, flexible system to accommodate any type of pay and deductions were the interesting aspects of this system. Implementing Pay Roll for one of the major Tea Estates in Tamil Nadu was one of his great achievements.

Fixed Deposits

When many non-banking companies were floating fixed deposits, there was a hectic competition between these companies in announcing new schemes. The system that he designed were so flexible, that to implement a new scheme, there was no change was required in the system as he had designed to keep the business logic in the database and not in the generated code.

Hire Purchase (Leasing)

Like Fixed Deposits, this system also became a success among his Customers. An honest person, he enforced validations in all his financial software with very strict control and collection follow up procedures.

Restaurant Management

When Computers were not even introduced in big Hotels, he successfully implemented systems in medium sized Restaurants – both for front desk and back office.

Medical Applications

Many interesting applications were designed by him for use by some of his friends who happened to be much respected surgeons & general physicians specifically in the specialization of Endoscopy, Optometry, Cardiology and Rural Health Care units. He did this more as a service to the human kind as he felt that the systems would help in providing a better service to the patients.

Hospital Management

He guided a team of young and fresh developers in successfully developing inpatient and outpatient management

Forestry Information and Management

The monitoring and analysis of Social Forestry schemes were computerized in the some states of India. World Bank and Development Agencies from Sweden, Canada and UK monitored and funded these projects. MSSR worked with all levels of people during these engagements. Consequently, he ended up being a household name in many of the remote regions where he would travel to train government officials in the use of the software that was designed for them.

Tools for increasing the productivity of Software Development process

Code generators were developed and used by his team in all the platforms that the systems were developed.