To our Aligned Automation Community
I hope that this message finds you and your community safe and well. Despite continued uncertainty across the globe, this year has allowed many to demonstrate resilience and provide opportunities to innovate. Our clients continue to drive up productivity while unlocking trapped value, managing supply chain and logistic issues and digitizing at a rate five times faster than projected. My commitment is to help our clients enable these outcomes while ensuring minimal disruption to daily business. We truly are “better together.”
With that, I am pleased to share our Aligned Automation mid-year performance highlights.
Overall results and projections
For the last two years, we’ve seen consistent quarter-over-quarter increases in customers and revenue. We see this continuing to grow exponentially. In 2021, we are on the path to double our revenue over last year. To continue honing our long range strategic plans I brought in Abidali Neemuchwala, former CEO of Wipro, to my advisory council. Abid has brought industry insight and best practices to our vision, alliances, and value proposition.
Customer Engagements
Aligned Automation’s solutions are resonating with both new and existing clients and we are seeing expansion in both. The core of our outcome-based, adaptive solutions is transferable between functions and industries. In the first half of this year, we have engaged new accounts in Oil and Gas, High Tech, BioTech, and Healthcare who see a direct application of our solutions in procurement and supply chain to help them realize their value capture goals.
In existing clients, we are pleased to see scaling of our services, both up and across functions. Proving our value with measurable results every 90 days has secured credibility and expanded our footprint in all accounts. Our existing customers trust us to execute on their digital strategies and, as such, have increased opportunities with us by 200% on average.
Continuing our commitment to promote and support diversity, we recently finalized our joint venture with AIS – a certified SBA 8(a) minority owned small business. This alliance allows us to further expand our reach into Healthcare and Government entities, while enhancing AIS’ digital offerings with our core strengths and capabilities in data science, automation, and business process management.
Solutions
Through targeted hiring, strategic partnerships and overall passion and intelligence, we drove a focused effort around industry leading solutions for our clients. To start, we added more rigor to Product Marketing and Product Management, structuring our services and solutions in a consumable and repeatable way. This has improved our ability to communicate the depth and breadth of our digital offerings.
AI/ML – Our clients’ business complexities demand AI to compete in the marketplace – from driving operational excellence, to margin enhancement, to customer experience. A recent industry report states that AI will substantially transform this industry in the next 3-5 years. Of those polled, 53% estimate spending $20M during the past year on AI tech and talent. As such, in 1H21, we increased our targeted efforts around AI with strategic best-in-class partnerships. In one of the partnerships, C3.ai, we built our bench of certified experts and have recently deployed several into a leading Oil and Gas company. With the explosion of data, the need for consistently improving algorithms, and real-time insightful analytics the opportunities for AI solutions for our clients will only expand and we are ready for those challenges.
Process Mining and Re-engineering – Critical to the success of any digital solution, like AI, is the ability to do end-to-end process mining and then improve the processes prior to any automation. This year we strengthened our partnership with Celonis increasing the utilization of their solutions as part of our overall digital strategy. Celonis fits nicely between our data science/engineering and our analytics/automation solutions.
Nerve Center – More than just a “platform,” our Nerve Center has become a way for businesses to manage their functions. Working with our clients, our team has developed an overarching system that brings together data, systems, tools; overlays initiative management, KPIs, spend management; and provides predictive and prescriptive analytics. Having designed the overall structure of the Nerve Center, our team can take this to our clients as a business-ready operation for Supply Chain, Procurement, and Supplier Relationship Management. I’m specifically proud of the solution provided to LYB and you can read the results in our LYB Insight Paper.
COEs and Change Management – To wrap up this section, I want to highlight that all our services revolve around two integral pieces – our Centers of Excellence and our Change Management Practice. Our COEs ensure we have the right talent focused in a nimble way on our customer’s outcome and required solutions. We’ve also added horsepower to our Change Management practice ensuring this discipline is part of each stage of our involvement – from stakeholder engagement and the start to defined change network and full adoption at the end.
Our People
The most important part of what we do and why we do it – our people. As mentioned before, I am excited to see the targeted and strategic hiring in play both in India and in the US. We continue to build out a highly capable technology team, consulting practice, industry and function focus with hires coming from high tech leaders, the medical field, CPG and the Big 4 consulting firms. I’m honored to be part of such a dynamic team that is highly dedicated to our values and our customers – so much so that we significantly outperform the industry for talent acquisition and retention with our turnover at only 3.4%.
Continuing our commitment to a people-focused place to work we honed our culture statement and our core values around our “4C’s” – Care, Courage, Curiosity and Collaboration. This is enhanced by increased focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – both in our hiring and in opportunities throughout the company.
I’m excited to announce that we will be opening Phase 1 of our new Pune facility. With our growth in customers, solutions, and revenue, we are able to open a new eco-friendly facility (pictured above) which is a forward-thinking and friendly working environment, and also shows our commitment to sustainability.
Conclusion
In closing, it has been an exciting, fast-paced first half of 2021. We set aggressive goals – and we’re hitting them. We continue to bring best practices from our clients and industries, innovate for success, and adopt and scale through change management at the center – all focused on enabling you to deliver on your business outcomes. We look forward to future developments and thank you for your ongoing support.
Sincerely,
Nitin Ahuja, CEO Aligned Automation