Chennai, March 12: With a focus on driving IT penetration across Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), IT major Microsoft India on Thursday launched 'Project Vikas' in partnership with the Centre's National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council (NMCC).
"With Project Vikas, we aim to help SMEs, by bringing tailor made software solutions and make operations more efficient, leading to increased revenues and creating relationships with customers and partners," Microsoft India, Emerging Geographies, Director Rajiv Sodhi told reporters here.
"With an objective of covering 25 industrial clusters, we have so far covered 10 clusters across the country," he said.
For training the SMEs, he said they have partnered with 30-40 institutions. "In Chennai, we have associated with several partners to develop solutions for various critical issues in leather manufacturing," he said.
"The initial areas which were targeted (to offer the training programme) were Pune and Jamshedpur for auto-industry; Ludhiana and Tirupur for textile industry; Hyderabad and Ahmedabad for pharma and Chennai and Agra for the leather sector" Rajiv Sodhi told reporters.
He said, 'Firstware Leather Solution' by Firstware Software solution - 'the hosted CRM solution' by Enzen and the 'hosted exchange' by Net4India were some of the solutions offered for the leather industry.
These software solutions, developed by Microsoft partners, had been tailor made to address critical business points in leather manufacturing and processing, he said.
He said the three key benefits of Project Vikas to the Chennai leather cluster were its tailor made IT solution, the E-Readiness Centre and a cluster specific portal. "It will help the SMEs and connect them with the national and global market," he added.
Bureau Report