The Future of Q2C - Why Subscription is the New Standard

In this episode of Acuiti Talks, Souvik, CTO of Acuiti Labs, speaks about the shift toward subscription-based business models and the technologies enabling this transformation. Souvik shares insights from his 20+ years of experience in the Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) domain, highlighting how businesses are moving from one-time product sales to recurring services. He explains the challenges companies face in this shift and how Acuiti Labs addresses them using SAP BRIM solutions, industry-specific accelerators, and proprietary tools like the Q2C Customer Portal. These innovations reduce implementation time and enhance customer engagement in a subscription economy.

Transcript

Hello listeners, and welcome to another episode of Acuiti Talks, your go to podcast about business process transformation in the area of Quote-to-Cash. In our latest series, we are zooming in on innovative products that can help streamline Quote-to-Cash operations. Join us as we sit down with Souvik, CTO of Acuiti Labs, to shed some light on the tools and techniques that can streamline and simplify business processes in today’s dynamic landscape.

Welcome, Souvik. It’s great to have you on board today.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here.

Before we start our conversation today, why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience and talk a little bit about your role at Acuiti Labs? And you know what your daily routine looks like?

Yeah, sure. Why not? My name is Souvik. I’m working as a CTO and research head here in Acuiti Labs. I have around 20 plus years of experience all together in the Quote-to-Cash area. Worked in various industries and use cases and various domains across the globe. So I’ve been witnessing how these industries evolve and how technology is shifting from one to another. And, where they’re heading these days, of course, the changes are very fast now, then they used to be.

So, it’s an exciting place to be and here in Acuiti labs, we are building exciting products and accelerators to help our customers, adapt their transformation into a subscription based, business process. This industry is seeing change like never before and I’m really excited. I really enjoy my day here. When I come here for work every day we are trying to innovate and come up with new products, solutions, innovations that can help our customers to transform their Quote-to-Cash journey.

Sounds exciting! So Souvik let’s kick off this episode by talking a bit about your experience in this industry and the changing landscape of businesses moving to subscription-based models. And, you know, the shift that we have been observing from companies moving from products to services. What role do you think that technology is playing in this shift?

That’s a very good question. Since I am with this industry, working in this industry for 20 plus years, I am witnessing the changes this industry is going through. And you are correct when you say that a lot of companies are moving into a subscription business model, which was not the case before. I mean, a few years back, no one would have imagined a cycle company would be selling cycle as a service or a printer as a service. But it’s reality now, right? So, yes, there is definitely a trigger for organizations to move into a recurring business model. And that needs different kinds of technologies, different kind of technology landscape rather, which can actually enable them to transform their journey into subscription business.

If you see, the car, previously all the cars were just sold, right? At a point in time, they sold for 25 lakhs INR or 25,000 USD and it used to be like just one transaction. Now what’s happening is the car companies, they’re selling their cars as a service. So, they are making a very low-down payment and then customers are on a monthly subscription basis. So, what’s happening here is there is a clear shift towards recurring business, which basically means from high value and low volume to low value and high volume.

So, the organizations now will be getting many invoices. Previously they used to get one invoice for one car. Now that cars are being subscribed for the next five years, they’re going to get 60 invoices. You can see how multi-folding their work and managing that with traditional systems or technologies they have been using is not going to be possible.

Industry is moving towards subscription based. As we call it, like a subscription based economy. Regulating authorities, they’re also coming up with new requirements to circle these guidelines so that this business becomes more organized or more regulated. That also needs a different kind of technology which is not possible through legacy technologies that were supporting a sales model. So, there is a need for new technology companies who want to get into this kind of business they cannot rely upon their old IT landscape, they need to transform. In Acuiti Labs, we help companies transform their businesses, getting them into a subscription business. We focus on SAP BRIM or SAP’s Quote-to-Cash solutions, its solutions portfolio, to enable their journey or help them transform their business, quickly and rapidly into a subscription or services-based business model.

Inside our organization, we build a lot of accelerators and products for our customers. How do you think these accelerators and products can help our customers in their transformation journey and shed some light on maybe what an accelerator is and how it works?

SAP BRIM is a generic technology platform or a technology framework that is specifically built for services industries. It’s not built for any specific industries. So, customers need to customize SAP BRIM or configure the SAP BRIM to cater to their requirements for industry specific requirements.

So, what we have done is we have built a lot of specific, industry specific accelerators. For example, we have built it for Port, Postal, we have it for Telecom, we have it for Hi-Tech. What we have done is basically we have pre-built these industry specific products, pricing and end-to-end use cases on top of BRIM and we have packed it, all together as an accelerator to track how this helps our customers.

Imagine the customer is going for a BRIM implementation. They know what BRIM’s capabilities are. They will go through the design and testing and probably after like few months or 6 to 8 months, they will first get to see how their systems will look like. Whereas, with our accelerators we have the use cases, there are business scenarios already pre-built. So even before we are starting to talk to them, they can see how it’s going to look like, how it looks like for another customer, how it looks like for their peers who are using BRIM and how they are managing their business.

So, this helps our customers to understand where they are heading and how their peers are managing the business, how BRIM can help and these accelerate their design, the accelerators, their ideas and this accelerates the timeline to a great extent. So, what would have taken like a year it can be reduced by at least 3 to 4 months and that’s where our accelerators help.

We have also built some products, on top of SAP’s Quote-to-Cash offerings. We have seen some opportunities where SAP doesn’t offer particular products and solutions. But our customers are looking for those. So, we have accepted those as an opportunity for us to build our own products and we have now integrated our products with our accelerators. So, this mix is a very nice, packaged solution for customers, for various industries. I think this really reduces the timeline for our customers doing their billing transformation.

So, you mentioned about building products. Would you like to tell us which one that is and how it actually works?

Yeah. So, in Acuiti Labs, we are not only just providing implementation services to our customers, we are also developing, few products. We have seen some spaces where SAP’s quote to cash offering is not catering to certain requirements that our customers are looking for and where we have found those, we have identified a few of those which are common among a lot of our customers. And we picked those and started building some products and we also started building some industry specific products.

So, if you go to our website or if you go to SAP store, you will find what are the products that we have built so far, the products that we are selling from SAP the one that I was referring to, which is kind of integrated with our accelerators as well. I mean, it’s not necessary. It has to go with the accelerator, but it can go just by itself as well. That one is quote to cash or Q2C customer portal by Acuiti Labs. So, this is a very interesting space actually and if you go back to my initial point about recurring business or subscription business, so recurring business, you imagine, when you are selling a car for one go. You take the money, you give him an invoice, and then you are done, right? But here what happens? You are leasing a car on a subscription mode for five years or ten years? If you take five years, you will be generating invoices every month.

So, for five years you’ll be generating 60 invoices, which require 60 payments and out of these 60 payments, if any of the payments can go, wrong customer may not make the payment. Customer wants to interact with you to understand the payments and invoices might get delayed, things like that. So, many things can happen. Your customer interaction level is very high in a subscription business. When you’re selling a product, it was like once you sold it. You are done. Maybe there is a services department who is providing services, maintenance, things like that. But when you are selling a product as a service, your interaction is iterative, then managing it manually, with your employees or business users is very difficult, right? We are talking about cars. But it’s everywhere, right? If you talk about cycle, look at How many cycles are on rent that you see on the street. And if you are an organization providing cycles on services and you want to touch base with them asking for payments to everyone, it’s not going to work. You won’t be able to scale. So, you need an interface to interact with your customer digitally.

And that’s what we have seen was kind of missing in this SAP’s BRIM offering SAP didn’t have a customer portal. So, we identified that, and we have built a customer portal. We have integrated with SAP’s BRIM solution. And very interestingly, since we have launched this on SAP store and customers have got to know about it, all other customers are interested in that.

So, every opportunity that we work on, they ask us about like, we have heard about your customer portal. Could you please show us how does it works? And, how it is integrated and how it is going to fit in our landscape. So those kinds of questions, this is really an area that we kind of unleashed, which was kind of untapped, and currently if, our customers are looking for our customer portal, they are always coming to us to provide a solution in that particular area.

That’s great. Souvik this has been an incredibly insightful episode for our viewers, I’m sure of that. Thank you for shedding light on this topic about the product Q2C customer portal. I am sure that we will continue this conversation in our next episode, and it will be even more exciting. We can dive even deeper into the features and functionalities of the product. But until then, thank you very much for being a part of this series.

Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure being here. And yeah, I am. I’d be very happy if I could help, contribute or influence our customers and help them embark into their transformation journey, by sharing my experience. So, thank you very much.

Thank you. And thank you, listeners, for being a part of this episode. In this episode, we covered a bit about our accelerators and products that we have at Acuiti Labs. We will be continuing this conversation with Souvik in the later and upcoming episode that we have, where we will dive a bit deeper into the features and functionalities of the product. But until then, thank you so much for watching.