Cost is the part you can control

Srividya Kannan's claim is that enterprise software has been buying down the wrong problem. Structured data — the ERP, the CRM, the HRMS — gets bought, installed and audited, but roughly 80% of any business process actually sits in documents, emails, invoices, contracts and approval annotations with no audit trail, knowledge she calls a core enterprise asset that is somewhere lost in transit. So Avaali stays deliberately narrow: only the expense side of the P&L — sourcing, procurement, supply chain, HR, contracts, AP and AR — never the revenue side, never manufacturing, never the structured-data stack, on the argument that 80% of an operational process is identical across industries, which is how a 300-person firm serves the same accounts a 10,000-seat BPO would. The delivered numbers she cites are 40–70% cycle-time and cost reduction across 300-plus large enterprises; the East African FMCG that took the whole operating model at scale on day one sent a written testimonial two years after go-live claiming 40% off due-payment approvals and 70% off master data. Her second claim is that competition has stopped mattering — put every tier-one SI, boutique and niche player together and the ecosystem still falls short of hands. The stakes sit in the third: growth is on every board's agenda but nobody controls it, while cost sits inside your own house. If India's captive GBS wave really is the next decade, the binding constraint is not talent or real estate but adoption — because a workforce that reads automation as cannibalisation will quietly sabotage it, as it once did with SAP.