“Avaali has been an exceptional digital partner since we first engaged their services in 2019. This partnership has revolutionised how we manage our Accounts Payable process in our Shared Services Centre. With this state-of-the-art automation, we have successfully processed over four lakh-plus invoices from several tens of countries across five continents, streamlining our accounts payable process. This has drastically reduced our processing cycle time, allowing us to gain complete visibility of invoices while considerably enhancing the efficiency of our accounts payable team. The team at Avaali has been instrumental in ensuring a smooth implementation process and seamless integration with our existing ERP system. Their team consistently provides excellent support services and demonstrates a deep understanding of our business need,” says Pushkar Rege, Global CIO, UPL.

Most enterprises recognise that active and meaningful engagement with suppliers is the key to success. Benefits include accelerated time to market, improved margins and reduced risks. Avaali’s unique Source-to-Pay platform is a compelling full-featured solution that automates the entire lifecycle of supplier engagement processes and significantly helps reduce sourcing and procurement costs. The platform delivers value by enabling full lifecycle automation of supplier collaboration processes.

The Velocious platform is the only solution that provides seamless out-of-the-box integration with any best-of-breed accounts payable automation solution as well as leading ERPs. Through this integration, invoices received via the portal are automatically extracted through the OCR engine. This is followed by automated processing and posting into their respective ERP applications.

Customer experience 

As businesses embrace digital transformation, connecting and transacting intelligently in innovative ways, Avaali supports enterprise customers not only in constructing new business models using digital solutions but also in executing their digital strategy and vision with the aid of digital tools and technologies. Its spectrum of services not only assists enterprises in developing intelligent internal business processes but also enables them to engage with customers in entirely new ways, creating a superior customer experience.

“Avaali is unique in the sense that we only support upper mid to large enterprises to leverage digital to create and execute new business models. We do this and nothing else. We work closely with your CMO organisation to help you to build great customer experience and engagement. We work with your internal operational process heads to help you drive agility in your business process with the help of digital. We offer comprehensive services across its life cycle right from consulting, to technology identification, implementation and support to change management and measuring the ROI. This ensures that we walk the talk and help you realise the value from your investments in digital,” explains Kannan who has significant leadership experience working with large technology and financial services companies.

Kannan has led diverse teams across multiple functions, including sales, business operations, alliances and channels, innovation, training & enablement, legal and contracts as well as business finance. She has a Master’s Degree in Business Management. She is also a Certified Cost Accountant. Kannan is also Editor of Illuminar, a digital publication that showcases various enterprise digital transformation journeys and extensively covers emerging technologies.

Avaali helps organisations significantly improve productivity and meet regulatory requirements by ensuring full visibility into both data- and content-related elements of a business process. Its consultants have a deep understanding of best practices as a result of implementing Enterprise Content Management solutions, with integration to ERP and other applications, for several global accounts. The company provides advisory services, implementation and support services to support the unique business process requirements of complex, global enterprises.

As part of its consulting services, Avaali partners with its customers to establish shared service centres and make them operational. It supports them to evaluate their existing business processes for accounts payable, accounts receivable, human resources, master data management, finance, treasury, etc and suggests best practices for aligning their processes with their business goals and service level agreements.

In one of the transformations by Avaali, the Piramal Group was looking to standardise the invoice management process and digitalise the process workflows to improve team productivity and leverage process automation across the invoice management lifecycle and supplier management activities. The accounts payable and supplier engagement processes had a lot of manual touch points, and the organisation wanted more transparency in their vendor communication process.

Here Avaali used its Kofax ReadSoft PDAP solution and Velocious Source to Pay Platform, that resulted in reduced invoice cycle time from 7-8 days to 2 days with significant reduction in invoice handling errors for the Piramal Group which has a presence across various sectors such as healthcare, life sciences, drug discovery, healthcare information management, specialty glass packaging, financial services and real estate, etc, with operations in over 30 countries. The group has a strong presence in more than 100 markets and has over $800 million in revenues. It employs over 7,500 people.

The group also saw consolidation of distributed invoice processing across more than 10 locations to a single location as also a standard AP process across the organisation for better governance and compliance. This led to greater satisfaction levels in both suppliers and internal stakeholders.

In another transformation, the Bengaluru-based developer Prestige Group faced challenges with rapid business growth, experiencing a large database, reduced performance, elevated administration costs, and increased downtime during upgrades. The Document Management System (DMS) and Archive link documents were stored in the SAP content server, requiring migration to OT ADA Cloud (Core Archive) while transitioning to SAP S4 HANA Rise. The challenge was to reduce administration and operational costs, as well as system downtime during maintenance and upgrade activities.

In response, Avaali identified OT ADA Cloud (Core Archive) for document migration, given the lack of document storage support in the content server while moving to S4 HANA Rise. Alongside migration, newly generated documents were directly stored in the Core Archive. Avaali’s solutions ensure long-term, cost-effective, secure storage, retrieval, and management of archived data through the OT ADA Cloud.

This resulted in a reduction of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) requirements for maintenance activities and patch upgrades. Moreover, it led to significantly reduced operational and administration costs, along with minimised downtimes during maintenance and upgrade activities. Furthermore, this ensured a reduced database size and improved system performance for the Prestige Group.

UPL is an Indian multinational company that manufactures and markets agrochemicals, industrial chemicals, chemical intermediates, and specialty chemicals, offering crop protection solutions. Headquartered in Mumbai, the company engages in both agro and non-agro activities, and has a strong presence in over 150 countries worldwide. UPL boasts over $5 billion in revenues and employs more than 7,500 individuals.

With its considerable size and scale, UPL encountered challenges in implementing best practices for establishing global shared services in India, covering operations for India, Brazil, and European countries. Additionally, the rollout of OpenText VIM across approximately 50 countries also posed a significant challenge. The increased volume of supplier invoices across multiple systems led to complexities and delays in payments.

Furthermore, the lack of uniformity in the process of invoice receipt, capturing, and processing made it difficult to track the status and lifecycle of invoices in a timely manner. The manual process had a substantial impact on vendor relations, considering that keeping track of payments and addressing vendor queries was a time-consuming process.

To overcome these challenges, Avaali implemented three of its solutions—OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions, OpenText Invoice Capture Centre, and OpenText Archiving & Document Access for SAP Solutions. These solutions significantly improved invoice processing turnaround time for UPL and enhanced the efficiency of the accounts payable team, providing complete visibility of all invoices throughout the process. These measures ensured the successful implementation and rollout to multiple countries across the globe.

In conclusion, Avaali Solutions has firmly positioned itself in the market, delivering substantial benefits to large enterprises through its services and solutions. The company has experienced consistent growth in its client base, with increasing demand for its end-to-end technological and service offerings in enterprise solutions.

As enterprises across all sectors heavily invest in digital transformation, Avaali is strategically positioned to meet the rising demand for technologies like RPA, package applications in sourcing, procurement, and supply chain areas, as well as AI, machine learning, and analytics for solutions such as conversational AI and chatbots, fraud prevention, and demand forecasting. These developments bode well for a technology company like Avaali, which is aggressively expanding its footprint.