Erbenlab CEO and Founder Sachira Fernando

What made you get into mobile development and ERP systems and artificial intelligence?

Well, I have been a mobile fanatic from small days and I was keen on developing mobile based software as I realized it’s the future we are heading towards. And with regards to ERPs, there’s an interesting story behind it. With every mobile app we have developed we will be giving a backend with it, and these back ends are usually, CRMs, sometimes HRMs and sometimes Inventories, and sometimes we got Finance & Accounting back ends as well. So basically these are the modules of an ERP, and we thought why not integrate all together and give it as a fully functioning system which is affordable to anyone. Also the main reason we focused on this was, Sri Lanka being a developing country it needs proper systems for its businesses to function properly, I have personally experienced the drawbacks of manual systems which they use and I have thought about how we can improve them, and that’s how “Cense” was born, our business optimization ERP software. With a cloud based artificial intelligence analyzing your business every second and studying it, we believe this is going to change the way people do business.

Tell us about one of your most enjoyable projects you’ve worked on.

I would say Erbenizer is the most enjoyable project I have ever worked so far, which I partnered with Sajeev De Silva, owner of Tea Avenue. It is a loyalty based mobile app with a customer relationship management system based on a user’s interactions with a particular business. We think this would change the way people managed their relationships with businesses.

Where do you see the future of your industry heading, and how will you adapt to the changes?

We are heading towards an information technology revolution and with technology comes the technology risk, so we have taken necessary steps to fail proof our software products and definitely people are seeking for simple, accurate software solutions to get their day to day work done, they would not go through tutorials or articles like they did years ago to figure out how to use a particular software package, it should be really simple in the mean time have sophisticated functionality so it would assist them in the way they expect it to assist, that’s where artificial intelligence comes in handy, because a sophisticated software would definitely have a number user routes where ultimately it would get the output user expected, artificial intelligence can assist the user in using the software and providing quality outputs and taking a user via the shortest route to provide efficient results. I think this is where we should utilize artificial intelligence, not on automatons or robots which will ultimately be a threat to us.

What is the hardest part about operating your company?

We develop software and definitely there are millions of other software companies, so standing out of all of them would be a definite challenge for me, but we make sure we introduce stand alone features which would make us the only provider of such technologies. Still it has been 6 months since we have formally started this company and so far it pretty much everything has been hard and now we are neutralizing all of those processes.

If you could leave our readers with one last piece of business advice, what would it be?

In my personal opinion, businesses shouldn’t be done to MAKE MONEY, but it should be done to help someone, bring enhancement to one’s life. When you focus on that, the money would follow you ultimately. Most of our entrepreneurs fail as they have money-centric business plans and when that does not work accordingly they get discouraged and disappointed. Build a community, a lifestyle not a MONEY-MAKER.