I prefer to focus on delivering outcomes: Srividya Kannan, Founder, Director – Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd

We got in touch with Srividya Kannan, Founder, Director – Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd to talk about her journey and other aspects of her career. In the conversations, Srividya shared when was the time she realized she wants to start her own company, the challenges she has faced, what is Velocious at Avaali, and much more.

Having professional experience of so many years, when and how did you realise that you want to start Avaali solutions?

Srividya Kannan: I do like to challenge myself and believe that the biggest learnings come from the toughest experiences. Entrepreneurship has been on my list for quite a few years. I wanted to experience the immense opportunities that entrepreneurship presents, to make a tangible difference in creating jobs and adding deeper value to customers.  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, present a big opportunity for improvement. That really led to building a purpose for Avaali. We’ve now executed assignments for over 120+ large enterprises to help them accelerate cycle time to process and consequently reduce costs by leveraging emerging technologies.

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Every business has a target audience or customers. What is your targeted audience?

Srividya Kannan: Our target audience is large enterprises who typically face challenges in the form of a long cycle to process as a result of reliance on unstructured content and workflows.

What kind of services does your company offer?

Srividya Kannan: 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 fantastic supplier experience and proactive visibility to the finance teams. We offer consulting, automation of processes with technologies like RPA, Information Management solutions and AI Chatbot solutions.

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 and Record to Report processes.

Tell us something about ‘Velocious’?

Srividya Kannan: As a part of our continuous focus on innovations, we invested in creating solutions branded under “Velocious.” Velocious is a range of ready to deploy solutions that sit on top of an enterprise’s existing application landscape to deliver quick automation of customer business processes.

Our Velocious solutions include the Supplier Portal which is a full-featured collaboration portal for supplier collaboration. We also have the logistics and shipment tracking solution that leverages chatbot and robotic process automation to accelerate visibility to our customers about their supply chain. We have the master data management solution that automates processes of creating, editing or deleting various masters. We also have the payment approval automation solution that automates the process within SAP of posting of the invoice to payment run.

Being a woman, how difficult is it to run a firm all on your own? Have you faced any sort of challenges with regard to your gender specifically?

Srividya Kannan: I prefer to focus on delivering outcomes. Challenges are everywhere. Getting bogged down by challenges only depletes energy and could be an immense waste of time. Rather, when faced with challenges, it is up to each one of us to consider it learning if it has taught us anything or move forward to explore newer ways to achieve our goals. I don’t think I’ve faced any sort of challenges specifically with respect to my gender. During the early days at Avaali, the challenges were many – we’re a bootstrapped organization and it is not easy to juggle the multiple facets of finances, customer acquisitions, and talent attraction all the same time. Getting across as a trusted partner to large enterprises was a huge task. These organizations already have various large incumbent vendors and in addition, had no dearth of large and mid-tier vendors who wanted to work with them. Building something from ground-up in such an environment and winning the trust of large enterprises has been one of the toughest things that my team and I have done.