Here’s the interview snippet from the interaction with Dr. Ameet Patil, Founder & CEO of Ecobillz Private Limited
IT Voice Spokesperson: Ecobillz’s main motive and aim for a world without paper can also be considered to be a great initiative, what was the initial ideology behind it?
Ameet: Habitual nature of human beings sometimes is a boon and sometimes a bane. In this advance digital world where everything can be available at your fingertips on a digital device (iPad, phone, etc.), people still tend to opt for print on paper. Back office and finance teams across many organizations are still struggling to maintain paper copies of important documents such as Tax Invoices. Govt. regulations require you to have these documents available for audits for upto 6-7 years. Hospitality industry alone prints enormous amounts of paper documents which are of premium quality. Millions of trees are cut in the process wasting key environmental resource.
Our vision is to eliminate the use of paper in businesses and make them 100% digital using technology. This will ultimately result in clean environment and also bring much more advanced systems into the business making it more productive and efficient in its processes saving huge costs as well in paper, time, and human resource.
IT Voice Spokesperson: How do you think the concept of centralization helps any business for a smoother workflow?
Ameet: Large businesses have offices in multiple locations each working as an independent entity (profit center). Centralization helps bring all documents, processes and systems together in one place to be used and accessed centrally. Take hospitality for example. A single hotel chain having multiple hotels in different locations will now have a central team manage all the hotel processes such as Account receivables, approval processes, income audits, reconciliations, etc. Instead of having disparate teams working locally in each hotel, now a common and smaller sized team can work in a central location. This not only increases performance/efficiency, it has huge cost benefits in terms of time and cost.
IT Voice Spokesperson: Automation can be considered to be of a huge help to gain much more efficiency, cost benefits, faster work time. Is there scope of improving aspects of automation?
Ameet: Absolutely. With the introduction of technologies such as AI/ML and big data analytics, systems have become far more powerful than old mundane manually processes. Such a system is capable of churning billions of data in minutes and give out analysis in real-time. Using such systems, now businesses can automate their entire back office and finance processes. Some of these include: credit card reconciliation, OTA reconciliation, income audits, pre-facto audits, accounts receivables and accounts payables.
IT Voice Spokesperson: If you could highlight upon the use of Contactless Module, and how it benefits the customer as well as the billing company?
Ameet: Human resource cost is ever increasing. Furthermore, due to high attrition rates, training and skilled resource has become a huge challenge. Contactless technology give power to the end user to perform self-checkin / checkout in a hotel. The guest will be able to browse through food menu and order on his/her own phone seamlessly. They will be able to settle the invoices from their hotel rooms without having to come to the reception. This will for the billing company will mean less skilled resources and less queues, more efficient processes and error free operations – leading to in the end – happy customers!
IT Voice Spokesperson: In terms of the usage of your products, how effective are your pricing?
Ameet: Our pricing is based on annual subscription-based licensing. We provide 6-8 months of ROI to our customers in the initial year itself. Then onwards it continues to be a huge cost saver in every area: paper, time and resource.
IT Voice Spokesperson: Digitization as a whole has come a long way, what aspects do you think has reached to a saturation where there’s no scope of improvement and what aspects can be improved?
Ameet: Use of software to manage inventory, billing, reporting is predominantly there in all business now. However, there is little use in the way the data stored in these software is being churned and utilized. For instance, digital software is still printing paper invoices, excel sheets are being exported from the software to churn and make sense of the data they have. Multiple different software within the same organization are disconnected. Data from each such software still needs to be aggregated in age old excel sheet and made sense of.
The next wave of digitization will be in reduce paper foot print and build systems such as Ecobillz that use Ai/ML technology to work with any software to collect, aggregate and churn data is way never imagined before.
