Meet Srividya Kannan: A Founder cum Director of Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd.
Founder, Director of Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd, Ms. Srividya Kannan’s interview published in womendigest
Meet Srividya Kannan, a true inspiration, a woman behind the success of Avaali. Avaali is a Bangalore based startup with a client base all over the globe.
Avaali is a consulting and technology services company specializing in Information Management. We work with large enterprises to help them increase process agility, drive governance and compliance with Information Management solutions.
What customers look for is trust. And building trust requires walking the talk. Trust in any relationship is crucial to existence, and that can only come when I consistently do what I say, says Srividya.
Womendigest caught with Srividya, she is the founder and director of Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd. An inspiring journey she has shared with us as a woman entrepreneur.
Tell us about your startup? And about the team.
Avaali enables process agility for enterprises via digital technologies. The agile business process significantly bring down their costs and improve turnaround time to respond to their stakeholders. Our team are specialists in the technologies that we work on including RPA, Supplier Portal, Chatbot, Shared service automation solution, OCR and archiving solutions.
When was the eureka moment when you decided to have your startup?
I’ve always thrived on challenges. I strongly believe that the biggest learnings come from the toughest experiences. Setting up something on my own has been my dream.
I’ve been engaging with large enterprise customers for a long time during my various corporate stints. One of the factors that have 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. Truly touchless processing is still a far-fetched dream. I realized that this space presents significant opportunities to make a difference in the way they work.
Where is your startup located? What are your plans for expansion?
Avaali is headquartered in Bangalore, India. We have wholly-owned subsidiaries in the UAE and Singapore. Avaali has a clear path ahead for scale and growth. We’re investing in our Velocious solutions, that is the next generation platform which converges various technologies to significantly accelerate the pace to business process transformation for large enterprises. We will continue to stay focused on expanding our share of wallet from existing customers as well as deepen our presence amongst enterprise customers in our existing geographies of MEA and Asia. In addition, we’re also focusing to increase our presence in parts of Europe.
Who are your competitors and how you see yourself competition?
Several of our competitors are big incumbent vendors at our customer accounts. Our ability to stay niche in terms of our digital offerings in the area of process cycle time reduction has worked very well for us. We don’t spread ourselves too thin. What we do, we do extremely well. We stay focused on delivering value to customers and work hard to stay as relevant as possible to deliver what is relevant for customers today. This has helped us win several marquee brands as customers for us.
What keep you excited about this startup?
Contributing my bit to India’s startup ecosystem, making a difference in the lives of my customers and employees and giving back.
Being a woman you have to handle a lot of things-tell us how you maintain a work-life balance.
I believe that work and life are not two independent responsibilities standing in isolation but are one. By its own definition, work means an activity involving mental or physical effort done to achieve a result. Work is a core part of life, and work entails our professional responsibilities as well as personal ones. We work on our personal relationships to make a strong connect with our families and friends. Even before making a commitment to either, we must be sure that we can keep time for it. I have a good household help which is great to get household chores done. As far as possible, I try to have back up plans in place. Having a supportive family is also important, and I’m very fortunate in that regard. Without support from my family, I wouldn’t have been able to get this far.
What is the most important learning which you want to share with our emerging women entrepreneurs?
What customers look for is trust. And building trust requires walking the talk. Trust in any relationship is crucial to existence, and that can only come when I consistently do what I say.
What do you suggest to a woman who is interested in starting their own business
Please don’t get disappointed with any initial failures. My experience has been that sometimes defying conventional wisdom and negating one or more assumption is important to bring something to life and scale it big.
Where do you see your brain-child in next 2-3 years from now?
We will significantly scale and grow across geographies. We would also have expanded our set of solutions for F&A, supply chain and audit and compliance processes. We see ourselves as having made an impact across over 500 customer organizations in the form of cost reductions and process cycle time improvement. Several of these are likely to be long term contracts that generate recurring business for Avaali. We will significantly increase our share of wallet from technologies such as RPA, AI Chatbot and Information Management solutions and importantly, add immense value to our customers. In addition, we will build capacity on solutions like AI / ML and Blockchain to transform enterprise business processes. We will expand our market presence to other geographies including parts of Europe and US in addition to having a deeper penetration in MEA and Asia.