As much as US$1.7 trillion is invested globally in digital transformation and strategic programmes every year, yet McKinsey estimates that 70 per cent of these initiatives fail to achieve their goals.
This is a problem being addressed by South African startup Fluid Business Solutions, which launched FlowState80 last year. A Managed Software as a Service Solution, FlowState80 is focused around portfolio, programme, project management, meeting management, task management and collaboration.
“Our solution is the first end-to-end offering that encompasses a programme’s entire ecosystem,” Mark Kayser, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), told Disrupt Africa.
FlowState80 is so named as its goal is to help organisations increase their productivity by targeting 80 percent on-time completion. It allows teams and individuals to adopt a standardised and optimised approach to tasks by utilising pre-defined processes, playbooks, templates and metrics, underpinned by an easy-to-use, intuitive collaboration system.
In all, Kayser estimates that the platform can help companies save one full working day in time every week in reduced administration because of the efficiencies FlowState introduces.
“We were built off the back of violations of common sense being prevalent in the project management space, and we wanted to address them with a solution that not only provides a single view of everything, but also helps the teams save time and effort,” he said.
“We noticed a gap for a single source of project truth. Most organisations use multiple tools, or none, to manage their large projects and programs. In terms of competition, there are other PPM solutions available, but none that we feel cover the depth of our solution, and include every aspect such as meetings.”
It is evidently a gap that needed filling. The company has offices in South Africa and the United Kingdom (UK), and clients across Africa, Europe, and North America.
“We operate globally as it is a cloud-based hosted solution, so we plan to expand to clients in every market,” said Kayser.
“Our clients love the solution, and we are actively growing and seeking more clients and more partner companies to take our product out to market.”
FlowState80 makes money through subscriptions to its solution, be they license-based or enterprise models.
“Revenue has been good so far, especially with how we have self-funded and grown, but now we are ready to take the next step in growth,” said Kayser.
