Series 3
Acuiti Labs' Products and Accelerators
Acuiti Talks - Episode 02
Accelerating Quote to Cash - Smarter tools for faster transformation
In this episode of Acuiti Talks, Souvik, CTO at Acuiti Labs, explores the features and value of the Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) Customer Portal.
From subscription management and invoicing to dispute resolution and payments, the portal supports both enterprise (SAP BRIM Private Cloud) and mid-market (SAP Public Cloud) customers. Key benefits include faster time-to-market, cost savings with SaaS, SAP pre-integration, and full alignment with SAP’s BTP roadmap.
A must-listen for businesses aiming to streamline revenue management and accelerate Q2C transformation.
Subscribe to our channel
Transcript
Welcome back viewers to another exciting episode of Acuiti talks, your go to podcast to talk about business process transformation in the quote to cash space. In today’s episode, we are continuing our conversation with Souvik, the CTO at Acuiti Labs. In today’s episode, we are going to be covering and diving a bit deeper into the features and functionalities of our Q2C Customer Portal.
Welcome back again, Souvik. It’s great to have you on board.
Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here.
So Souvik let’s kick off this episode by talking about the features and functionalities of this product. And you know, who do you think are the customers that will benefit the most out of it? Like the type of industries or the type of businesses?
Sure. Let me answer your question on features and functionalities in two parts. One, make it like the technical part of it, and then one functional part of it, so if I look at the technical part of the it, we have quite a few variants, right. So, there are multiple variants actually. So, you have one variant that supports SAP BRIM which is on private cloud.
You have another variant that is for SAP BRIM that is on public cloud. So many people may not know what SAP BRIM is or public cloud. So, SAP has a quote to cash offering comprising of SAP CPQ, SAP subscription billing and SAP S4Hana Public cloud. And all these applications are actually on public clouds.
And that’s called SAP BRIM on public cloud let’s say. So, we have two different variants. One is for the private cloud which integrates with SAP BRIM then we have one variant on SAP BRIM on Private cloud. Right. Now the first one, the one that supports BRIM, is aimed at enterprise customers because SAP BRIM is Typically for enterprise customers, whereas the other variant it actually, built to cater to mid-market segment because public cloud again, is mostly for the market segments. So, these are two technical variants, features and functionality wise we are almost same. We provide some additional features and functionalities, on the private public cloud variants. For example, purchasing solutions like you can buy a printer associated services and then some warranty altogether from the portal itself. And then make the payment and it will create the contract. Subscription contract. And then it goes on from there. Whereas in SAP BRIM we don’t do that because we usually see the B2B contracts. Those are created at the back end. We start with the contracts being created in BRIM, and from there the rest of the features and functionality the same. Now, if we talk about the features and functionality, what we provide is starting from customers onboarding so the customer can come onto the portal. They can create their contracts, you can purchase the products, they can purchase subscriptions, they can purchase additional services or warranties that the particular customer is offering. And once that is there, they will be able to view their subscription. They will be able to manage it from the portal. They can pause it. They can cancel it; they can renew it. So, all these options are there at the end of the subscription cycle. When the invoice is generated, they will be able to see the invoice.
They can see all the line-level details of their invoice. If they are not okay with invoices, a particular line item they can raise a dispute. and then they can track their dispute that they have raised. Once the dispute is being answered, yeah, they will be able to see their response. And once they are okay with that invoice, they can pay that invoice. We have quite a few payment gateways integrated already. One of them is Stripe, one of them is Go Cardless and we have integrated with SAP’s digital payment add on. Yeah. Which is SAP is recommended payment gateway integration tool. So, we integrate with SAP’s Digital Payment Add-on or DPAO as they call it, and DPAO in turn integrates with all the SAPs. So, this is what SAP’s recommended approach for payment integration. So, we have built that integration as I said. Right. We have a variant for BRIM, and we have a variant for public cloud. So, we are catering to enterprise customers as well as the mid-market segment. The public cloud variant is catering to enterprises, and public cloud is for mid-market. That’s clear. But we have also built some additional industry-specific features for them, for our customer portal. And specifically for enterprise customers, for example, the customers were using BRIM. One of those is like a preliminary invoice. So typically, in an enterprise landscape or in an enterprise environment.
They are dealing with large customers in space. And they want their invoice to be for the first time. Right. And because those invoices are large in value. And they don’t want to create incorrect entries, go to corrections. So, SAP provides preliminary invoice functionality. We have enabled preliminary invoices to be available on the customer portal. So, when these invoices are generated, customers are notified.
They can look at it. If they are okay, they can accept that in turn generate their legal invoice. They are not okay. They can reject it and raise a dispute at the same time. And once that is resolved by the end user, it goes back to the end user. They can go and work on it, resolve it, and once it is resolved, the invoice is back.
And every time this invoice is generated, the preliminary invoice or the real invoice, there we have a notification framework that triggers notifications to let them know that their invoice is generated or when their payment is due, the due date is approaching three days before or seven days before the notifications and things like that. So, we have enabled really, rich features that are not available on a generic portal, which is not built specifically for Quote-To-Cash. I believe what we have got in this area, in this custom portal space, is really fascinating and that’s the reason as I said earlier if you work on every customer we talk to, they are very interested. We are getting a lot of opportunities in this space right now.
Right. That sounds quite extensive. So how do you think that this portal can provide more value to our customers?
Yeah, that’s really interesting. You know, I strongly believe that we can position any product or solution or even our customers will show the first light of interest if they see a value and we believe that there is a lot of value in this product.
So, first, it saves their cost, to start with. I mean, that’s what people are looking for, right? It is pre-integrated. It’s already available as a SaaS, so the customer doesn’t need their infrastructure. They don’t need to have a team to build this portal. They just get it right out of the box that comes pre-integrated with their SAP solution.
Imagine if one customer is trying to build this. They will have to build a team that needs mixed skillsets. They need some people from business who will give them the requirements. They need some people with a UI front-end scale and back-end scale, they need to design their own technology, and they have to go for infrastructure. So, there is a lot of operational cost if they try to build it. Whereas we offer a SaaS mode subscription, we are in the subscription business. We offer our products in subscription mode. So, it becomes their CapEx they just pay for one single annual subscription, and everything is included in that. So that helps them to get started quickly. As well as move from capital expenditure to an operational expenditure model.
The third thing is the Quick Time-to-Market. Even if you start this portal project, your organization is going to take something, between 8 to 12 months at least. And I don’t think by that time they will be able to come up with a portal enriched with so many features and functionalities that we are offering. So, it helps. It gives them immense benefits on TTTM, time-to-market, right? They can go Live in like, 2 to 4 months’ time with our product. Whereas if they try to build this from scratch it’s going to take at least more than a year. That’s what I think.
We have made some calculations on the cost savings. I don’t want to take a number, but it’s not very less, it’s a quite significant number. That they are going to save by going with our product.
Last but not least, they don’t have the headache of maintaining it, it’s provided as SaaS, software as a service. We own the maintenance of the product. If SAP changes anything, a new API comes in. There is a need for new features or functionalities in the product. We take care of it. We develop and deliver it. I can see there are a lot of benefits for the customers and values for our customers.
Souvik, do you want to tell us how closely we are working with SAP on this and are we aligned with their roadmap?
Yes, of course. We are aligned to SAP’s roadmap, and we are working very closely with SAP. Our products are sold from the SAP store by SAP account executives. So, we are very aligned. We are continuously communicating with them. Whenever we develop something new, features, or functionalities, we keep them updated. We organize time-to-time demos to keep them updated on what we have done so far and what we are doing.
We also give them feedback, like what our customers may need or what customers are looking for on the portal, and SAP does provide us with that information. So, we are very aligned.
Technologically speaking, we are right now Live on SAP BTP, which is SAP’s cloud offering like a public cloud platform offering, where SAP wants all the products and services to be offered on BTP. So, we have already done that, we are there.
We are also integrated with SAP’s digital payment add-on. Which SAP recommends using for integrating with any payment gateways and we are also testing all the new APIs that SAP’s releasing on their products and solutions. Every time SAP’s coming with new APIs, we always see the fitment if that is relevant for customer portal. We try to adapt to those APIs, and we include them in our product.
That sounds great. Thank you, Souvik, for giving us such great insights today. I think we covered a lot of interesting topics that would be very beneficial for customers looking to transform their Quote-To-Cash journey. Again, thank you for being here and part of this series and we can’t wait to have you back again sometime soon.
Thank you, Rhea. Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure being here. And I really hope that, with our products and solutions, we are able to help our customers and make them successful in their transformation journey.
Thank you, Souvik. And thank you to you, listeners, for being a part of another series of Acuiti Talks.
We will be back again soon with another exciting episode. Till then, thank you.
