Education Industry Needs To Be Standardised In India: Rajesh CKR, MD, priFact Solutions

What made you start priFact? And when?
Here in India, the education industry is not heavily standardised unlike in the developed countries. Not enough standards means institutions device their own systems of running and managing them. This fragmentation or non-unified processes and procedures is the gap we intend to fill with priFact. While the gaps are present in many facets of the education domain, we are committed to help institutions fill them, one step at a time. Our idea is to bring about automated processes which will enable collaboration, continuity, transparency, accountability and efficiency among all the stakeholders of the ecosystem of education. We are convinced that with our information technology capabilities we can achieve these goals ultimately, one step at a time

Tell us in detail about its features like PriVox, PriFACE and others?
Running institutions with thousands of students and hundreds of teachers not to mention the support staff the complications for the board members increase day by day. Given today’s dynamics of statutory compliances and large number affiliations only help increase the convolutions in the organisation. Among these, for all the stakeholders the single most important objective is to deliver the best quality of education to its students. Not only academic education but help the kid grow from the overall perspective. Along with academics; students must also be helped in growing social skills, physical activities etc.

While the institutions are busy delivering education and knowledge, they also need to have a proactive hearing mechanism in place to address concerns, comments and commendations of all the stakeholders at regular intervals as well as on ad-hoc basis. This mechanism helps the institution grow in terms of quality and also helps maintain smiles on the faces of people who are delivering service and on those who are receiving services.

If there is one issue that is keeping the school authorities away from their sleep is ‘Student safety”. This problem remains the most challenging in our education establishments and elsewhere in other industries and workplaces as well. By far ‘Student safety’ take precedence above all. Here at priFact it is our organisation policy to continuously challenge the status quo and address the problems which are clear and present.

Registering, monitoring and tracking are the crucial steps involved in organizing a successful passive surveillance system. The passive system can only help if manned constantly and precisely. It is best effective in the post-incident analysis. It rarely helps detect incidents as they happen (in real-time).

priFact’s priFace active surveillance is an artificially intelligent system has state of the art high-tech face recognition system in its centre. Such system coupled with motion sensors, voice detectors, intelligent lighting systems, IR systems, distress monitoring system working seamlessly with each other tightly integrated into the priFact system ensures the school authorities sleep well.

How does priFact work?
priFact operates on an inhouse built multi-tenant SaaS(Software as a Service) platform. It is developed, hosted and maintained by us. We are constantly working towards increasing the capabilities and efficiency of the system. It means that customers will invest zero rupees as a capital expense and zero rupees as recurring expenses. All they need is a decent internet connection for their computers and mobile phones.

What makes you different from your rival like Edumerge, Fedena, Pupilpod and chalkbox etc?
We are keen listeners and explorers. Our system is not a stiff jacketed monolithic off the shelf product. It is an extremely adaptive and customisable system of automated processes. We constantly seek challenges and problems faced by various stakeholders like teachers, principals, parents, students and many others through dialogue and experiences. We not only do what is wanted we do what is needed. The 'needed' part is what we are passionate about.

What’s your strategy to stand out in this not so old industry?
priFact is for us a constant quest for efficiency and collaboration. It is a never-ending engineering feast where we constantly seek problems, hurdles, roadblocks that hinders the knowledge delivery process and solve them.

What is the total cost of equipping a school with priFact?
Working computers and mobile phones with android or iOS along with reliable internet connection.

Won’t such arrangement add to the expenditure of the schools and ultimately prove to be a burden on middle-class family’s pocket in the form of a hiked fee?
priFact delivers constantly diminishing the cost of ownership and constantly appreciating a return on investment. We have delivered demonstrable cost savings to our clients regularly. Be it saving on massive human effort, increasing multidimensional efficiencies, enabling collaboration through multiple media communication along with over 99 per cent availability in the safest possible environment for the data and users. priFact's pricing model is extremely economical.

Do you think brick-and-mortar schools would like to adapt the new-age feature in their operations, switching from their traditional methods of teaching?
In this age, all the schools will have to adopt technology to deliver quality. Technology is actually a cheaper option to achieve collaboration, efficiency and transparency. We are not challenging the present day or traditional teaching methodologies, we are aiming to automate them as much as possible so that the participants are able to focus on the most important and let the computer do the mundane.

Not all school students are provided with smartphones, so shall it be considered that your target consumer group is elite schools having students from well-to-do families?
Our mobile apps for made for teachers and parents. Students are given their explicit access credentials through the computers. Students will be able to access what is relevant to them like notes, communication from teachers, home assignments etc. We do not advocate students carrying mobile phones.

Do you only collaborate with schools or you are also open to individuals willing to access you?
priFact is a student-centric information and management system for educational institutions of all types.

Do you see platforms like Prifact as the future of school learning programs in India?
Yes. We do. priFact addresses some facets; there are many more that requires addressing in the near future.