How Dovient Uses Direct Customer Engagement to Drive Industrial SaaS Growth

One of the projects I was working with the government on, I helped the department with their inventory management and vendor management, which made me realize how broken the ecosystem of maintenance is in the industry. Later, with a mentor, I ventured into the pharma industry to realize the problem is much more severe for manufacturing industries. Starting from government and pharma, we consciously moved towards manufacturing, building features in asset health, PM scheduling, planning, reports, dashboards, inventory planning, stocking, and audit prep features. From there, stepping up by helping manufacturers move from 0 to 1 and scale from 1 to X in their maintenance digitization journey. Every plant we studied showed the same gap, critical knowledge existed, but it was scattered across people, paper, and systems. Now, DOVIENT captures tribal knowledge, automates workflows, and provides real-time, AI-driven insights to reduce downtime and improve efficiency. Our goal is to make maintenance smarter, proactive, and seamless for industrial teams worldwide. They can interact in local languages, which removes a big adoption barrier.

Growth tactic that worked was direct walk-in. For a year, my team and I walked directly into the factories and met hundreds of plant heads, maintenance heads, COOs, and other leaders. Those conversations became our real market research. They showed us what maintenance teams actually struggle with, what they ignore, what they fear, and what they are willing to pay for. More importantly, those meetings shaped our product and helped us win long-term customers. The tactic that flopped was cold calling, followed by weak references. We also made the mistake of targeting small units with fewer than 200 employees. For them, the need was not urgent enough, the downtime cost was not painful enough, and the ROI was not exciting. We spent too much time trying to educate and convince. The biggest lesson was to target companies where downtime is costly, maintenance is complex, and leaders are already looking for a better solution.

Customers mainly complain that they cannot find the right information quickly when something is urgent. During a breakdown or audit, they may need troubleshooting steps, old fixes, asset health data, spare part details, work order history, or reports. Most companies already have systems that store this data, but the problem is access. The information is often scattered, hard to search, or hidden inside different screens, files, and formats. Dovient works like Google for the plant. A maintenance manager, technician, or plant head can ask one simple question in natural language and get the right answer instantly. They can search for asset details, past breakdowns, repair steps, inventory status, trends, PM history, audit records, and work orders without jumping between systems. So instead of wasting time searching, teams can act faster, reduce downtime, and make better maintenance decisions when the pressure is very high. Also, the onboarding time of new staff members gets reduced by half.

One thing that the market gets wrong is that digitalization means more tech and fewer people, but actually it is more about people successfully utilizing the tech for their operations so that they can focus more on strategic initiatives for themselves and for the company. When the right tools are used in the right way, teams can find information quickly, follow better steps, avoid repeated mistakes, and save time. Then people do not have to spend their day searching, writing reports, or doing the same manual work again and again. They can use their time for bigger things, like improving processes, solving important problems, planning better, and helping the company grow. Digitalization is evolution. You cannot want to still hunt for food in the wild when the world around you has moved on to grocery shopping online. You cannot call it tradition and the purest way of doing things. In this era of AI, it will be a suicide mission.

Our next focus is to acquire clients in the US and Europe. We are also expanding Dovient beyond maintenance. The goal is to build strong use cases for quality, production, executive leadership, and P&L impact. This means helping teams not only fix breakdowns faster but also improve decision-making, reduce losses, track performance, and create measurable business value across the plant and leadership levels. Currently, if SAP is your system of record, Dovient Copilot becomes your system of execution. If you have IoT devices, Dovient becomes your system of intelligence and engagement.

We have 6 clients on our platform now from various domains of manufacturing.

I've worked across multiple verticals, delivering turnkey solutions for Moody’s, Chaikin Analytics, and government agencies. My expertise lies in building high-performance tech teams that drive execution excellence. At BeyondScale, we focus on scalability, AI-driven automation, and cloud innovation, helping businesses optimize infrastructure, streamline operations, and accelerate digital transformation. We mainly had clients from the US and Singapore. As Chairman of BeyondScale Technologies, I provided strategic direction, ensured strong governance, and supported leadership in driving growth. I focused on long-term vision and industry partnerships while enabling the team to execute and scale effectively. My role was to keep the company future-focused, innovative, and positioned for sustained success.

We tried to build everything for everyone on the shop floor, which failed to translate in the pitch. We used to always prepare different pitches for different leaders, but in the demo, we showed them everything we had built in addition to what they actually wanted. This would often lead to confusion for our leads and sometimes raise expectations and requirements. Customers would expect us to give a truckload of products at a dollar rate. We learned to limit the scope and target only the challenges that are most common for the maintenance department. Now we are much more efficient in showcasing the capabilities of Dovient.