Sabu Francis & Associates

The concept of "Just-in-time" is NOT the same as outsourcing. We DO NOT outsource our work. SFA has never believed that outsourcing can work in a design organization, because of the dynamics demanded by the iterative design process that we use.

In terms of physical size and infrastructure, SFA is a very, very tiny office. However, in terms of capabilities and committed human resources it is fairly large. This happened because SFA has managed to keep almost ALL its employees on the net. Most of them work for SFA on a "just-in-time" basis (explained below)

A group of our employees can work together though they may be located at different physical locations. Though it may look that they are working separately, it is not so because they would use the Internet to tightly integrate themselves as a whole. This is possible using software that we've developed and some external open-source software. In fact, the integration is often better than what would happen in a conventional office simply because everyone has to formally document practically everything they work on. In a conventional office, much of the office wisdom is lost because the employees can talk to one another, and those talks evaporate easily.

Our roster of employees are people who are enrolled after a careful screening process. They form our "Just-in-time" employees. The term "Just-in-time" used here is similar to that used in production engineering and it gives us and our clients similar advantages.

"Just-in-time" production techniques allows Toyota and Dell to produce high quality products that are tailor made specifically to customer demands. These products (cars or computers) are made using raw materials that are made available just-in-time i.e. these companies do not maintain a huge inventory of raw materials as is done in traditional companies. Dell, for example, is reputed to keep a tiny inventory that can last for just two weeks. A sophisticated computer program tracks customer behaviour and intelligently orders parts that are expected to get exhausted.

This allows them to be flexible and change the design of the car (or computer, or whatever) that is being produced as per the needs of the customer without affecting their bottom lines. They win their customer's satisfaction too. At the same time, the companies remain extremely competitive price wise. Nowadays, there are quite a long list of companies that adopt "just-in-time" practices. (Another example is McDonalds) From that angle, SFA is just one of them. However in the field of architectural consultancy in India, SFA is the first to adopt this method.

Service deployment
We would pick up employees from our employee roster and give them work depending on the services that we need to render. Hence all employees can be doing any other work, for all we care. When we get an assignment, we would choose a group from the roster who would be responsible for rendering the service. Those who agree to participate in that assignment MUST make themselves available in front of their computer with an active Internet connection (They need not be physically transporting themselves to our office). This is quite similar to an offshore oil-rig, where there are many employees who are on board, but only some of them are actually on the job. The others would be catching up on their sleep, etc. In order to accomodate a situation where a particular individual may be preoccupied with other work, we would keep our roster as large as possible. This ensures that we need not turn away any prospective clients.

Profits for everyone
We are therefore a lean, mean, fighting machine of a consultancy organization that understands the medium of the Internet thoroughly. We can afford not to have a large physical infrastructure for our office and neither do we have the baggage of employees who consume overheads when the office is not rendering sufficient services. All those savings are passed on to our clients while we achieve the same profitability as before.

Security
All employees would be given a digital signature for them to authenticate the documents produced by them. This is highly secure ... in fact, even more secure than what regular physical signatures can be. There is no way, any one can interrupt the internal communications between employees and subvert the data.

Drawbacks
This has only one drawback: Sometimes, we may not be in a position to render services that requires constant physical presence of our employees at an offsite location. However, with time, and improvement in the qualifications of employees who appear on the roster; we hope to remove this deficiency also. As we are located in Navi Mumbai, India; we can work the way regular architects do in and around Mumbai/Navi Mumbai area.