The Hindu Business Line : The language of business

You are a multinational company with a manufacturing unit in China, an assembly unit in India, warehouse in Dubai and the end-customers in the Nordic nations.

Your biggest nightmare is likely to be a scenario where none of your employees understand a common language for business to go on.

To avoid such a situation, most companies with overseas operations employ translators or candidates with multi-lingual capabilities in middle and senior management positions so that they can communicate with the workforce.

But such candidates may not always be able to explain hard core business processes or jargon. For instance, would a manager know the Chinese or Arabic equivalent of ‘abnormal demand filter’ or ‘backflush’ or ‘kanban’?

Also, organisations usually employ English language software across locations to avoid complexities associated with multiple software integration.

This further delays critical decision making, as one needs to translate data from English to the local tongue and then back to English.

Would it not be helpful if there was a seamless software application transcending language barriers? Where a Chinese employee can perform and view his application in Chinese and the Arabic employee can do the same in Arabic, while an Indian employee can do it in Hindi?

To each his style

Hyderabad-based Exensys Software Solutions’ enterprise business suite called ‘eXensys 4.0’ offers to do just that.

Launched recently and available in seven languages — French, Russian, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Greek and English — the software enables a global enterprise to be truly global in terms of enabling communication.

The suite has a configurable and customisable front end so each user can personalise his workspace with the colours, themes, font and styles of his choice.

It transforms complex business data into dynamic information for taking action. The solution can be deployed across multiple organisations — vendors and clients — and also has a Web-based interface, says the company.

Avoiding beaten track

The company first toyed with the idea of linguistic software a few years ago and decided to avoid the conventional method of hosting a dictionary over an application that merely translated words to their nearest equivalent.

Instead, it chose to map data structures and fields between languages. As a result not only are words translated but they are also grammatically correct and in the right context, it says.

“Because we follow this architecture, we can extend our application to any new language in eight weeks,” says Mushtaquddin Mohammad, Chief Operating Officer of the company.

Exensys today offers vertical-specific ERP solutions in these seven languages and will add more languages depending on client requests. It has over 100 global clients in verticals such as retail, automotive, public, manufacturing and trading.

The company has currently partnered with firms such as EDS and Gartner to carry out research to find out how effective this software is.

“We believe the total cost of ownership of the software will be 40 per cent cheaper than other products. However, we will not leverage the product merely on price points,” Mohammad told eWorld.

eXensys 4.0 is built on.NET and C Sharp platform and is compatible with any existing software on the client’s system.

archana@thehindu.co.in

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