Indian enterprises are investing in digital to reduce costs

A business leader with more than 19 years of experience across diverse functions, she has extensive experience in creating and managing high-performance teams. She founded Avaali Solutions as a services and consulting company with the vision to support the creation of a connected enterprise where information and networks are highly leveraged to drive profitable revenue growth. In an interaction with Dataquest, Srividya Kannan talks about Avaali’s offerings, the growing demand for digital infrastructure, and the company’s future plans. Excerpts:

DQ: Avaali specialises in operational efficiency improvements and consequent cost reduction for large enterprises. Can you tell us how you do this and the solutions you provide?

Srividya Kannan: Avaali works with large enterprises to help them consolidate, standardise and automate business processes using a confluence of emerging technologies. We have deep functional knowledge in various operational processes such as Source to Pay, Order to Cash, Record to Report, treasury, HR, contracts, audit, and compliance. Using our functional expertise coupled with significant hands-on experience in a broad range of technologies, we define the most optimal process for enterprises and bring down the cycle time to run that using automation solutions. We have executed over 120+ shared service initiatives for enterprises and use a range of technologies from workflow automation solutions, content management, OCR, RPA, digital signature, and chatbot solutions, all integrated with their ERP. We see significant potential for enterprises to bring down their operational process cost and deliver margin improvements by leveraging digital.

Our customers have benefitted with a 35-50% cost reduction in business operations. Governance and control in executing processes have gone several notches higher.

In the last 12 months, we have seen the number of engagements on shared service themes including standardisation and automation go up by five times.

DQ: What kind of business outcomes has Avaali delivered via your engagements?

Srividya Kannan: Our customers have benefitted in the form of a 35% to 50% cost reduction in their business operations. Additionally, the governance and control in executing processes have gone several notches higher. Given that most employees are working from home, it is getting increasingly difficult for our enterprise customers to monitor controls and security in addition to ensuring optimal productivity and engagement. Our solutions provide intelligent dashboards and deep insights into the way these processes are conducted, thereby ensuring minimal anomalies. Also, there is proactive visibility into the process to enable them to make informed decisions.

DQ: What is the level of maturity of digital adoption in Indian enterprises for operational efficiencies?

Srividya Kannan: Indian enterprises are very vigorously investing in digital with a view to reducing costs. In the last 12 months, we have seen the number of engagements on shared service themes including standardization and automation go up by five times. While they are making good beginnings, there is still a significant opportunity for most enterprises to deliver tangible improvements in their P&L by leveraging digital. There has been a huge surge in adoption in the last 12 months; however, we still have a lot of work to do.

We are investing in more meaningful and long-term engagements with our enterprise customers to support them with margin improvements via digital.

DQ: How has the pandemic impacted enterprise investments in digital?

Srividya Kannan: The entire work from home and lockdown scenario meant that enterprises had to forcefully adapt to the new way of working. The only way they could do this effectively is via leveraging automation to a great degree. Several customers inform us that these are the only projects getting approved by the board. We expect that this momentum will continue for the foreseeable future.

What are the future plans of Avaali? Avaali is heavily investing in automating the procurement and supply chain process for our customers. Our continuous innovations in our supplier collaboration platform will deliver superior incremental returns for our customers. We are coming up with solutions that will enable more effective working capital management and optimising inventories. Our next-generation dynamic discounting solution will help our customers to bring down their procurement cost by at least 8-10%. We are investing in more meaningful and long-term engagements with our enterprise customers with the objective of supporting them with margin improvements via digital. We’re also investing in increasing our share of wallets in other geographies such as MEA and Europe.

Srividya Kannan

Founder-Director, Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd