As technology advances, people are always looking for more convenience and simplification. Don’t want to bother with going to the grocery store? You don’t have to — you can pay someone else to do it. Don’t want to bother with cooking? You don’t have to — you can have someone deliver you food.
Similarly in business, people are always looking to make their work more streamlined and simplify outdated processes that cause companies to lose money.
Enter Pulpstream, which created a platform that streamlines process management in a way that has made it “the most powerful platform for digitizing workflows,” Founder Pankaj Malviya says.
Prior to founding of Pulpstream in 2014, Malviya founded two companies that were later acquired, including LongJump, which “is about allowing small businesses or departments to quickly create web applications using a browser,” Malviya says.
Through his work with LongJump, Malviya discovered something fascinating: “What I learned is that most people are trying to create business processes rather than applications. Many businesses are trying to solve a problem and it almost always involves a business process.”
This led to the launch of Pulpstream. “We wanted to go to the roots of solving these problems and create a platform that businesses can use to create an entire business process,” Malviya says. “We wanted to digitize the business process of an organization.”
Here’s another way to look at it, as described by Malviya: “Data needs to be actionable. If I am recording an incident in a file, there should be a task for someone that a claim has to be filed for this incident.”
With Pulpstream, Malviya wanted to go deeper than most companies. He wanted to empower business users instead of IT developers. It created a platform that requires zero coding to streamline processes with focus on accessibility.
“Whether you are on a mobile phone or in a field office, or you are in a place where you have no network connectivity, one should be able to access data, complete tasks or initiate new requests from wherever they are,” Malviya says.
Pulpstream does that, but it doesn’t just do that — it takes significant steps more than other workflow platform competitors. “It is a fact that if you provide a platform and you let businesses discover what they can do with it, it requires a lot of effort and commitment from a business analyst or IT to build a solution and give it to their business users,” Malviya says.
Instead, with Pulpstream, Malviya decided to go beyond just creating a platform to actually creating solutions. Pulpstream has a set of solutions that are not merely a template, but that are ready-to-go solutions that can be used by organizations to streamline their operations.
Pulpstream’s focus is on streamlining processes for People-Management, Risk and Safety Management, and Insurance. “We give businesses the power to easily reconfigure a process without taking any help from IT,” Malyiva says.
In the time of COVID-19, this is especially important. Issues such as site inspections look differently than they did a couple of months ago and “we’re changing business processes to allow more tasks via phone,” he adds.
“Our platform,” he says, “is highly adaptable, so we not only made changes to existing processes to accommodate, but we also created some new processes for them so that the various departments can now operate entirely from home, but still understand what issues their employees are dealing with.”
In fact, Malviya says that coronavirus “hasn’t been any different than changes that are requested other times because accommodating change is in the DNA of our company and our platform.”
Understanding processes and data is increasingly important for all companies. In the six years of Pulpstream’s life, Malviya has seen a shift in companies understanding the value of data.
“Today,” he says, “understanding how the data is impacting their business has become an important market for them. What is the data telling them? What are the issues in their processes? What are the issues in their organization? How can they understand that data to improve their efficiency? What we do is enable companies to gain insight its data.”
Most of the organizations using Pulpstream now were using either antiquated systems or email, Excel and paper to run. They had a solution that was not modern or integrated.
“With Pulpstream, organizations are able to streamline processes and gain access no matter where they are. Gaining that edge makes your company highly valuable,” he says.
Keeping that edge is critical, especially as technology advances. The future of Pulpstream will evolve with the learning of artificial intelligence. Malviya envisions the industry going in the direction of “incorporating machine learning and AI to provide recommendations to the process owners and to help companies become even more streamlined. Today, they have to go to dashboards to understand what this data is telling them. As the years progress, the process platform itself is going to suggest things based on the different trends the platform is seeing from the data it is collecting.”
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Pulpstream CEO Pankaj Malviya)
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