Avaali deepens its footprint in digital procurement Srividya Kannan Founder, Director-Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd.

Bengaluru, Karnataka [India]: Srividya is a proven business leader with more than 19 years of experience across perse functions including Sales, Alliances & Channels, Strategy, Innovation, Business Finance, Operations, and Sales Enablement. She has extensive experience in creating and managing high-performance teams working in large matrix organizations such as Wipro, Oracle, and SAP. 

 Srividya has a passion for incubating functions and successfully integrating them within larger businesses. She brings strong process orientation, work ethic, and integrity coupled with an ability to create and orient teams for long-term success. 

 In her five-year stint at SAP India, Srividya managed various roles including heading their Business Operations, SAP India User Group, Partner build organization, and their competitive intelligence team. Before SAP, she was with Oracle in their Alliances & Channels team. She spent over seven years between Wipro Finance and Wipro Infotech where she managed various roles including heading their Business Finance for Enterprise Products, Sales for Banking & Finance vertical, was a key member of their Innovation team, and managed the Western Region for Wipro Finance. 

 Srividya founded Avaali Solutions Pvt. Ltd. that began operations in January 2013. Avaali is a professional service and consulting company focused headquartered in Bangalore. The vision behind the company is to support the creation of a connected enterprise where information and networks are highly leveraged to drive profitable revenue growth. Visit www.avaali.com for more information.

 Srividya has done Masters in Business Administration from Mumbai University and ICWA post her Graduation in Commerce. Some excerpts of an interview with Srividya:

Why is digital adoption in procurement assuming special significance in today’s context?

The pandemic has created a seismic shift in focus for enterprises towards minimizing disruption, targeting growth, and building resilience in operations going forward. With no definitive end in sight, enterprises are now taking a hard look at the way they conduct business, analyzing their spending, and executing plans to conserve cash. Enterprises are now focusing on digital procurement to drive profitability in the face of uncertain growth. 

Challenges concerning the state of supplies, supplier engagement, and procurement costs while always important, have now assumed a new level of urgency. Enterprises are taking a view on the more granular aspects of procurement impact, across factors such as force majeure exercise by their suppliers, supply disruptions due to geopolitical factors as well as ensuring that the cash flow requirements of suppliers are taken care of via timely invoice payments. The procurement function is also facing tremendous heat due to the remote working of their teams. These teams now need to be equipped with digital infrastructure as well as importantly, information and data, to be able to conduct their transactions. The procurement function was always high on priority for automation initiatives, but the pandemic has pushed the levels of urgency several notches higher.

What are the key areas in this function that are getting automated and what outcomes is this expected to deliver?

Enterprises are investing in digital solutions to minimize human intervention across the process lifecycle, from sourcing to supplier shortlisting, negotiations, supplier onboarding, supplier master creation, PO release, goods receipt, and automating the entire invoice to post and payment processes to minimize risks and proactive visibility across the value chain. 

Spend analytics uses quantitative methods to analyze massive data sets and enable insightful decisions. Enterprises are minimizing discretionary spending and apply advanced automation to bring down procurement costs (both the cost of running the process as well as the input cost).  They are also actively running simulations and stress tests to determine which materials, services, and vendors are at high risk and putting mitigation plans in place. They’re investing in automating their supplier collaboration processes to have early visibility of open purchase orders, likely delayed deliveries, and poor performing suppliers, to then take proactive steps to minimize risks. Enterprises are also automating the invoice-to-pay process to bring down their invoice processing costs, eliminating errors and ensuring timely payments.  Procurement teams are actively monitoring their supply sources to have backup plans and considering shifting to local suppliers when required. With digital, enterprises are bringing down their procurement process cost by at least 40% while reducing direct material and services cost by 10-15%.

What solutions does Avaali provide for automation of the procurement process?

Avaali has worked with over 120+ large enterprises to consolidate, standardize and automate shared service processes with digital. The source-to-pay process is intrinsic to almost every transformation program we have done. We use a confluence of technologies to drive automation. Our supplier collaboration platform, with its full-featured functionalities, enables a single source of truth between enterprises and their suppliers. Almost the entire lifecycle of supplier engagements gets automated with this platform. This platform in turn seamlessly integrates with accounts payable invoice automation solutions as well as with leading ERPs. Our payment approval automation solution automates the payment run and workflow processes therein and provides strong audit trails. With solutions like ICR, digital signature, and RPA, we automate various processes in this function such as the PR approval process, supplier onboarding, and master data creation process, reconciliation processes, etc. We also have solutions for contract management that ensure version and records management, workflow automation with audit trails easy search and retrieval process.  

What are Avaali’s plans in terms of your investments in this space?

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 optimizing inventories. Our next-generation dynamic discounting solution will help our customers to bring down their procurement costs by at least 8-10%. We are investing in more meaningful and long-term engagements with our enterprise customers intending to support them with margin improvements via digital.