Research for the NASSCOM ER&D Quarterly Newsletter

Futurefactor360 is a strategy consulting firm specializing in the areas of globalization, digital transformation, market research, sourcing and vendor management. NASSCOM, a not-for-profit industry association and the apex body of the $194 Billion Indian IT/BPM industry is a FutureFactor360 client. NASSCOM engaged FutureFactor360 to create and publish the NASSCOM Engineering Research & Development (ER&D) quarterly newsletter. Priyanka Mohapatra, a management consultant at FutureFactor360, was in charge of providing industry content for the newsletter.
The NASSCOM ER&D newsletter has two types of content:

  • Articles by industry CEOs, executives and thought leaders
  • Industry news
    • Deals and partnerships
    • Newsworthy company personnel appointments
    • New investment announcements by major industry players
    • Mergers and acquisitions
    • Indian manufacturing news
    • Industry events and report releases

You can access the newsletter here.

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The wide variety of industry topics and events to be covered meant many documents had to be collected, organized, and processed by Priyanka and her team. Using available tools such as bookmarks, note taking apps, email (for collaboration) introduced a significant amount of overhead and friction.  

According to Priyanka “Numici provided an ideal platform for document centric note taking and collaboration. The Numici taskspace is an ideal platform for document organization and collaboration by being a single source of truth for the entire team. It enabled me to add documents with a single click and they were visible to the entire team immediately. Status was maintained between work sessions enabling us to start where we left off in the previous session, a great time saver. Notifications alerted team members to events like addition of new documents, comments by reviewers etc.”  

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Project Taskspace
Selecting specific pieces of text from the document to be included in the newsletter was made easy because Numici lets you highlight as you read. Numici stores the highlights automatically including a link to the exact place in the document. This makes later reviews much less time consuming as the context is just a click away.

Tagging was used to categorize the highlights into related buckets, making a digest of notes easier to review. “The digest which is essentially Numici gathering all my notes in one place, categorized by tags I had used is my favorite Numici feature. Previously when I had to gather all my notes in one place manually, it was very time consuming. And I was never sure if I had not missed an entry. Context for the highlight is available in the digest via an embedded deep link i.e., a link to the exact spot in the document where is highlighted text occurs. This saves time and effort”.

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Typical project document with highlights
Priyanka had to work with colleagues to validate and finalize the list of news items to be included in the newsletter.

The collaboration feature in Numici made validating text selections with colleagues very smooth and quick. We didn’t need time consuming zoom meetings or emails. Just adding a colleague to the Numici taskspace enabled both of us to see the digest and add review text by using the reply feature.

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Project Digest

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Sample Page in Newsletter
According to Sampath Rajagopalan, founder of FutureFactor360, “Management consulting projects require significant effort in researching topics by extracting key information and insights from a diverse array of documents. Our team was making do with an ad hoc set of tools. Numici, designed from ground up to streamline research, has been a great productivity booster and ensures that we don’t miss any important information when we are creating our reports. We at FutureFactor360 plan to use Numici in all the future projects.

About FutureFactors360

Futurefactor360 comprises of a global team of consultants who work closely with customer stakeholders to help better navigate cost, complexity, competency and culture aspects involved in the reimagination and creation of the digital future. FutureFactor360 supports global enterprises in their digital transformation journey by envisioning and implementing smart and intelligent products, plants, processes, and people practices. Their goal is to help enterprises reimagine and refresh their organizations for the digital age. 

About NASSCOM

NASSCOM, is the premier trade body and chamber of commerce of the Tech industry in India and comprises over 3000 member companies including both Indian and multinational organisations that have a presence in India. Our membership spans across the entire spectrum of the industry from start ups to multinationals and from products to services, Global Service Centers to Engineering firms. Guided by India’s vision to become a leading digital economy globally, NASSCOM focuses on accelerating the pace of transformation of the industry to emerge as the preferred enablers for global digital transformation.

Engineering Research and Development

Engineering Research and Development