Prasanna Rajendran, EMEA Vice President at Kissflow, has worked at the company for around 20 years. Currently he manages the regional marketing for business via a strong team that is able to coordinate between distant offices in Europe and the Middle East.
How would you describe Kissflow’s growth trajectory in the MEA region over the past year? What’s driving demand here?
Over the past year, we have seen strong and accelerated growth in the region, both for the Middle East and Africa. We are acquiring a lot of new customers, and there is also very good expansion that’s happening in our existing customer base. In the last few years alone we acquired large enterprise accounts like Coca Cola, Mai Dubai, Kanoo Group, BCI in the KSA and Leadway in South Africa. In addition to crossing off several key milestones, like doing large multi-department deployments.
Most of our customers started small with a few use cases, but now they have enterprise-wide rollouts. If you look at the reason for this demand, you’ll quickly realise it is due to urgency. Our enterprise customers feel constant pressure to modernise their legacy applications, automate their processes and digitalise their entire operations. CIOs cannot afford long development cycles, and they also don’t want a heavy dependency on IT.
An ideal solution is a low-code, no code platform using AI capabilities to help IT teams to deploy faster. Kissflow is an ideal product as we are in a low-code category and we also provide many AI capabilities within the product. It allows people to build processes faster and provides an environment where the business teams can also build applications without heavy dependency on IT.
What makes MEA a strategic market for Kissflow?
Kissflow has been focusing on enterprise demand for roughly two and a half years and MEA is a hub for enterprise accounts. Enterprise accounts are diversified by nature and fast when it comes to adopting the latest technologies.
The other advantage is that decision making in the region often happens from the top down. This makes the adoption much faster, because there is always leadership involvement in any strategic decisions we make. The region has an appetite for a very strong platform standardisation. They want a platform-based standardisation across their process automation and application building.
Which markets within MEA are seeing the fastest adoption of low-code and workflow automation, and why?
There’s a rapid adoption that’s happening in the markets like UAE, the KSA and South Africa, which are our primary markets. For Kissflow, we want to be vertical-driven and focus on areas like retail, FMCG, real estate, construction and manufacturing. The real reason why it is picking up in these regions is that they possess a very strong vision for digital transformation.
How are enterprises in the Middle East approaching digital transformation differently from Europe or India?
The Middle East is completely different compared to Europe and India. In Europe it is mostly done in increments and driven by IT. They’re still not very comfortable about citizen development and they talk a lot about compliance-first.
India is very cost-driven and not in the league yet. In the Middle East everything is driven by the business outcomes. Leadership is involved in any such decisions and CIOs are expected to deliver results within months, not years. So they need a platform like Kissflow, which provides the agility and governance to scale any digital operations.
Kissflow has identified retail as a key vertical in MEA this year. What challenges in retail are most urgent today?
If you look at the retail market, especially in the MEA region, they have to deal with highly distributed store networks. They have to manage a lot of stores and a cross border supply chain in order to keep up with the competition. There is also a heavy dependency on seasonal and promotional cycles, which they have to do in order to keep up with competition. Finally, they face challenges related to workforce scale and management.
So they need a system which takes care of end-to-end visibility within their operations and also they need to have speedy execution, because with data-driven insights, they can make faster decisions. Cost control is another challenge they face today, because many in the retail market run on low margins. Kissflow is going to help provide an end to end solution, a digital backbone for their operations, which in turn helps them to enable operational visibility, speed of execution, and eventually save on costs.
How are retailers using low-code platforms like Kissflow to modernise operations—especially supply chain, procurement, and store operations?
Procurement and vendor onboarding are two major areas of importance because retailers will have to manage compliance and reduce the cycle times. For these two areas, we have a pre-built solution, which will help them to control everything involved in procurement. Store operations is another area, Kissflow is used to manage the incidents, checklists, audits and approvals needed to run the day-to-day store operations.
In terms of supply chain workflows, they have to manage escalations from the vendors, track SLAs, and also they have to make sure the exceptions are handled really well. For these operations you will definitely need automation. These are not covered in the core ERP. So you will need a system or solution, like Kissflow which helps them to do end-to-end orchestration among all these systems.
Apart from retail, what opportunities do you see for manufacturing and large conglomerates in the region with workflow automation and process orchestration?
We see a huge opportunity, both in manufacturing and in the conglomerate, because both operate with multiple legal entities, and have a shared services model for their supporting functions, like HR, finance and procurement. They are both also cross functional when it comes to approval chains, either within the entity, or across entities.
They need a system which will help them to automate the use cases in the finance processes like capex approval. For areas like plant operations and maintenance they will need a system in place in order to manage with compliance, quality and audits. Because these are multi-entities, they have a requirement to have visibility across their whole group of companies.
Can you share a compelling customer story from the Middle East that highlights measurable business outcomes?
Mai Dubai, one of our customers, bought Kissflow last November, and in the present they’ve automated close to 50-60 processes.
The real feedback we got from them is being a lean team they could automate 50 processes in a short span of time and they’ve reduced a lot of manual effort. They’ve also reduced the cycle time by 50% and any approval that takes longer is now automated with Kissflow. They’ve also removed some of the steps in the workflow which are not essential or required for them to do it.
Overall, they’ve taken a platform approach and standardised all the processes across multiple departments.
What KPIs or ROI metrics matter most to MEA customers when they invest in low-code platforms?
MEA customers are choosing a low-code to make sure that they can go live faster. They are not ready for a long development lifecycle, so some of the metrics are time-to-deploy, both in terms of creating a process and in terms of maintaining the application. They also want to reduce the process cycle time, eliminate manual work and errors in the manual operations.
Every enterprise customer, when we sign up with them, has a three or five year engagement with us. So TCO and a return on their investment is something they are very keen on.
How quickly are enterprises in the region able to deploy workflows compared to traditional development approaches?
Traditional development will take months to deploy even a single process. If you take, for example, procurement process or order management, it’s easily six-month time investment to influence production. But a low-code platform like Kissflow, can do the same process in weeks and also substitute the domain knowledge of people.
Most enterprise customers, for all the sophisticated applications like procurement automation or distribution/fleet management, are using the IT team or pro developers, to automate it. These display the advantages of being lean as they can deliver faster, and are also empowering the business people to build applications within the team and department level. One of our customers in the MEA region bought Kissflow to embark on a citizen development journey and the finance team has built around 25 processes on their own, off-course with the guidance from IT. So compared to any traditional development low code is much faster. With the advent of AI, a lot of capabilities will help substitute the domain knowledge and technical knowledge required to build an application.
Image Credit: Kissflow
