Examinater simplifies evaluation process for universities
One of the many ways entrepreneurs startup is when they face a situation and an opportunity at the same time in their real life. True work in building a great product is just like art, art imitating life. And such an interesting story revolves around this product Examinater by SrushtiSoft.
Laptops for school
Back in 2003, when Pavan Gayakwad, founder of SrushtiSoft was studying to be a computer science graduate, he came to know that his university in a town called Shimoga near Bangalore in Karnataka, India is following tedious manual process for setting exam question papers. As a passionate computer programmer, he decided to put his programming skills to automate the whole process and started working on it. After completion of software development, he showcased software to the university examination panel and they were impressed with the quality and security measures taken in the application and felt its worth to go for automation.
The university conducted few exams using "Quick Quest" software and it turned out as a very efficient, quick and a secured approach. The software not just reduced university expenses, but increased operation efficiency, quality of question paper, saved time and avoided risk of question paper leakage. The registrar of the university appreciated the software and its execution whole heartedly.
With this success story, he finished his studies and worked as a software engineer in many big organizations like Dell and Target. All those years of experience, work that he did was a value addition to start his own company. That's when he took the step forward and started SrushtiSoft as an official company on the eve of New Year 2012.
Slowly the question paper setting software got a few more customers and opened opportunities to talk more educators. Finally after interacting with one of the universities they got an opportunity to solve their problems with M.Tech evalutation process. This lead to the building of the product Examinater - The thesis evaluation software.
Its main focus area is education. Apart from typical fee management, library management, student management, the kind of systems there are many other special areas in education sector that are hard to identify at first sight.
Examinater helps university to collaborate and communicate with peers efficiently by digitizing and automating thesis dissertation process. A postgraduate student has to prepare and submit thesis based on the research work they conducted. The candidate shall submit four to six printed copies of the thesis, the university then initiates the evaluation process by sending thesis to the internal and external examiners through postal service for valuation, communicate to conduct viva-voce exam and publish results.
"The thesis dissertation end-to-end manual process used to take 3 to 6 months and Examinater reduced it to 15 days," said Pavan.
Currently they have seen workflow implemented in Examianter is followed in many universities even in foreign countries. Examinater is running its 2nd year tenure at VTU (Visvesvaraya Technological University) one of the biggest universities of a top city for the education sector in India, Belgaum. They've successfully processed around 7,000+ theses; its track record already made news and they see it is having great potential to serve any university in world offering post-graduation courses that includes thesis submission work.
Examinater’s success at VTU, Belgaum has created lots of interest in other universities in Karnataka. Daily 5,000+ professors login to this system, gets 23,000 page views every month. According to Pavan, they also conducted a survey with 428 professors and 98 percent of professors were well satisfied with their product.
SrushtiSoft is a self-funded company and having plans to continue with the same model. "We have few, simple and precise and hopes to expand beyond just a few cities," he said.
For now, this looks like an interesting startup idea, implemented well with their range of products, would be interesting to see how far they go beyond implementation especially from the perspective of higher volumes and bigger universities across the globe.