Less than a decade before, construction contractors in India were taking pride on the

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usage of spreadsheets for their cost estimations. But as the infrastructure sector grew larger, the spreadsheets got stuck.

But now, KingSlake, a Sri Lankan software solutions company, has brought to the Indian infrastructure industry a software product named WeCap, exclusively for the purpose of cost estimation in the infrastructure sector. “Priced at $10,000 with a 20 per cent annual update, the solution has been built on the OpenEdge platform, which permits it to run on any operating environment,” said KingSlake, MD, S Dharmavasan.

The product is proprietary under Van Meijil, a Netherlands-based civil engineering solutions company, which is already selling the product in the European market. KingSlake has a partnership with the Dutch company, through which it will get to enter the infrastructure market, while Van Meijil will gain presence in the Indian market.

“We are already providing solutions to the auto and other manufacturing industries in India. Instead of a uniform supply chain solution, we provide products for each level on the operation workflow, as it is more specialised and hence of better quality,” Dharmavasan said.

India contributes to about 30 per cent of the company’s revenues, with Europe and Malaysia contributing 30 per cent each. “From our Van Meijil partnership, we will be launching products for other operations in the construction sector like planning, cost control, asset management, building models and the like,” Dharmavasan added.

But, the construction industry has been outsourcing its non-core functions to external consultants who work with spreadsheets and blue prints manually to generate results. And that is why, Dharmavasan estimates a potential market of $20 million among infrastructure companies for the estimation product alone. “We are in talks with about six potential clients and expect to have signed up four installations by the end of this fiscal year,” Dharmavasan said. Some of its existing clients in India are Sundaram Brake Linings, Valve Italia in Coimbatore.