Given The Variety Of Customer Requirements, Getting To Quick Turnaround On All Fronts Means Having To Make Calculated Decisions On Project Risks: Srividya Kannan, Avaali Solution
Brief us about your business model like how did the idea came to start and how does it work (step by step procedure)?
I’ve been engaging with large enterprise customers for a long time during my various corporate stints. One of the factors that has always been intriguing is that even though they spend a lot of dollars on transactional systems, they still have 80% of their processes which are handled manually – business users must deal with a lot of documents in various formats (both in physical and electronic) and workflows/approvals/exceptions are via emails and typically manual in nature. Process stakeholders spend a lot of time looking for information that is typically lying in bits and silos across the enterprise. Governance and risks are huge because confidential information could be accessed by unauthorized users and when a knowledge worker quits the organization, unfortunately, a lot of information is lost. These factors have a huge impact on productivity and cost and in turn, presents a big opportunity for improvement. That really led to building a purpose for Avaali.
Avaali works with enterprises to help them to accelerate process agility via digital. We offer consulting, automation of processes with technologies like RPA, OCR, Information Management solutions and AI Chatbot solutions. We have our products called Velocious for supplier collaboration (supplier portal), logistics and shipment tracking and have add-ons like master data management or payment approval automation solution that caters to superior supplier experience and proactive visibility to the finance teams.
With our shared service capabilities, we support enterprises set up shared service centres and automate processes in the Procure to Pay, Order to Cash, HR, contract management, Record to Report processes etc.
What are the unique key points of your company?
We specialize in automating the lifecycle of unstructured content and workflows in enterprise business processes. We do this with emerging technologies.
How are you different from the existing competitors?
We focus on enabling process agility for large enterprises via digital services. We do this and nothing else. Given our specialization, we’ve built deep functional and business process skills that are imperative for our customers to realize returns from their investments. Our mobilization and turn around time is very quick and coupled with our deep expertise, we’re able to deliver value to our customers consistently.
What is the funding status and monetization model?
We’re completely bootstrapped, almost zero debt and profitable.
What challenges are you facing in running your business?
We’re planning for rapid scale and growth. Quicker deal conversions and faster cycle time to project go-lives require us to have a very fine balance between understanding requirements on the one side while ensuring that we don’t spend too much time prior to the quote. Given the variety of customer requirements, getting to quick turnaround on all fronts means having to make calculated decisions on project risks which skill needs to be imparted at scale across key team members so as to meet business objectives. We’re working to effectively address all these challenges.
How has been the people`s response so far?
Its been great. In these challenging times, enterprises are realizing that they could significantly de-risk their businesses by ensuring touchless processing. Our pipeline has grown significantly in the past six months and this year looks very promising.
7. What are the traction details (like users, app downloads and other achievements of the company)?
We’ve executed over 120 projects across Asia, Middle East, Africa and parts of Nordics. These have been with marquee brands and the top 100 customers in several industry segments.
How do you look at expansion?
Avaali has a clear path ahead for scale and growth. We’re targeting doubling revenues this year. We will continue to invest in our velocious set of solutions that leverages a confluence of various technologies to significantly accelerate the pace to business process transformation for large enterprises. We will continue to stay focussed on expanding our share of wallet from existing customers as well as deepen our presence amongst enterprise customers in our existing geographies. In addition, we’re also focusing to increase our presence in parts of Europe.
What has been the biggest learning’s so far?
I would say a lot of strong reinforcements rather than learning. Some of these include:
a. The fact that great talent can deliver high impact results quickly, challenge the status quo and make a huge difference.
b. That while the scale is important, it cannot come at the cost of profit and positive cash flows.
c. That enterprises are no longer so much worried about how big or how many years their vendors have been in business – they more value how their business partners and vendors could add value to meeting their financial and other goals by being a knowledge partner.
