As part of the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative, in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we’re continuing to highlight solutions that are enabling broader societal impact, and our partners’ journeys growing their business on the marketplace. In this edition, I sat down with AffableBPM Founder and CEO Rajashree Varma to learn more about their story and partner journey. AffableBPM is a winner of the “Rising B2B Startup” award by Women in Cloud (WIC), and Rajashree has also been recognized as a WICxTop100 Founder.
About Gena: Gena Goh is the Partner Advisory & Inclusive Growth Senior Strategy Lead with the Global Partner Solutions business at Microsoft. She focuses on developing strategies that elevate the voice of partner and enable partners to innovate and build solutions toward a more inclusive economy, including leading the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative. Gena is also a professionally trained co-active coach and enjoys helping people and organizations chart new paths to purpose and impact.
About Rajashree: Raj is a serial entrepreneur with 20+ years of deep passion for technology and business leadership who brings proven track record of success in all aspects of business formation, innovative solutions, sales, strategic channels, operation, finance, management, fund raising, acquisition and exit strategies.
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[GG]: Tell us about AffableBPM and its mission. What inspired the founding?
[RV]: AffableBPM is an AI-enabled SaaS solution that automates manual processes for healthcare back-offices, that increases efficiency, minimizes compliance risks, and improves decision-making with unified data in the cloud. We help to reduce the huge cost involved in back office administrative processes, delivering faster ROI for our customers, and ultimately influencing the cost of patient care in the USA We are a HIPAA compliant solution on Microsoft Azure, that provides secure digital transformation to our customers.
I love leveraging technology to solve business problems. I come with my Microsoft experience and background, and also previously owned a consulting business focused on Microsoft stack and Cosell. Following its acquisition by Xoriant, we grew the Microsoft Cosell business into a double-digit multi-million-dollar venture. I then co-founded this company with Linda Roberson and Linda brings with her extensive executive experience in healthcare. Together, we contribute complementary skills to AffableBPM.
[GG]: Can you tell us a bit about the application(s) you have available on the marketplace? How does it work?
[RV]: AffableBPM provides two versions, AffableBPM Enterprise and AffableBPM Express, catering to organizations of all sizes for streamlined business process automation. AffableBPM Enterprise is designed for larger enterprises requiring customizable workflows, while AffableBPM Express is ideal for small businesses seeking to automate specific workflows. Additionally, AffableBPM offers AI-enabled plugins to enhance accuracy in data entry for documents like contracts and invoices, ultimately boosting efficiency.
These offerings are conveniently accessible on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as transactable offers. By choosing Microsoft’s marketplace for AffableBPM purchases, customers gain access to a trusted platform that seamlessly integrates with AffableBPM’s offerings. This ensures security, compliance, and efficient licensing and billing capabilities. Opting for Microsoft’s marketplace not only expands AffableBPM's global reach but also provides you with straightforward options to manage subscriptions, licenses, and payments effortlessly.
[GG]: How has Microsoft supported you along your marketplace journey through ISV Success?
[RV]: ISV Success helped us understand various options available to publish our solutions on marketplace. The benefits provided like Azure credits and development tool licenses came handy in conducting POC on various Azure Services we had planned to evaluate. Overall, the support received through tools and consultations helped us expedite publishing our solutions to the marketplace. Adding AI makes the workflow automation even more efficient and productive to really help our clients. It can speed up our growth as well as our clients. We achieve this by using tools like Azure Form Recognizer, Copilot, and ChatGPT in our solution. That brings power of AI to our healthcare customers. Being in ISV Success has given us technical guidance from Microsoft experts, enabling us to effectively use AI technologies. This support has been crucial in resolving any challenges during our development and in building an AI-enabled team for us.
[GG]: What was your experience publishing a transactable app on the marketplace and what benefits did it bring?
[RV]: Initially, setting up transactable offers, particularly through the marketplace, seemed overwhelming. However, with valuable assistance from Microsoft ISV Success consultants, we successfully streamlined the technical integration process. This involved utilizing accelerators such as Mona, the Marketplace Onboarding Accelerator. Mona is designed to facilitate the rapid onboarding of transactable SaaS solutions to Azure Marketplace and AppSource for ISV partners. Mona incorporates lightweight, reusable code modules deployed in our Azure subscription, along with low/no-code integration templates featuring Azure Logic Apps. The transactable offer significantly improved the management of billing for our SaaS customers. Additionally, the provided APIs played a crucial role in automating the provisioning process by capturing changes in subscription status and add-ons. This collaborative effort ensured a smoother and more efficient set-up for our transactable offers.
[GG]: What Microsoft cloud products did you use in your app development, and how did you decide to use those products?
[RV]: AffableBPM's SaaS solution, developed on the complete Microsoft stack, allows us to leverage cross-cloud products, ensuring a customer-centric approach and address diverse customer use-cases. We utilize Azure services such as Azure App Service, Azure Virtual Machine, Azure Application Gateway, Azure AI services (Document Intelligence), Azure Logic Apps, Azure BCDR, Azure HIPAA Blueprint and Power BI. To assess the cloud products available, we conducted Proof of Concepts. The ISV Success teams offered valuable technical consultations, enabling us to grasp best practices and pitfalls of these products. This guidance helped us identify the most suitable options for our business use case. We are further in evaluation to assess integration with Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365. By leveraging the Microsoft stack, we don't have to do everything on our own and can go to market faster. Partnering with a hyperscaler like Microsoft is a great way to boost sales, leveraging their credibility to expand our business.
[GG]: AffableBPM was recognized as a Women in Cloud WICxTop 100 Founder and your support for ESG efforts. Can you share how you’re aligning your business and solutions with the UN SDGs?
[RV]: We're a proud member of Women in Cloud and appreciate its recognition as a WICxTop100 Founder and Rising B2B Startup. Our company is committed to bring scalability and reliability to corporates to support long-term resource efficiency and sustainability of business processes in support of the UN SDGs. AffableBPM can help make an impact on several areas of UN SDGs aligned to sustainability and industry innovation, such as Goal 9: Industry Innovation and Infrastructure (Goal 9.4: increasing resource-use efficiency and sustainable industrial processes).
AffableBPM offers healthcare back-offices an opportunity to optimize their processes digitally, eliminating inefficiencies and reducing the carbon footprint by storing the data in a centralized location on the cloud. Our solution facilitates digital hosting of documents, seamless remote collaboration, and rapid contractual processes, all contributing to enhanced resource efficiency and reduction of waste.
Beyond digitalization of manual back-office processes, AffableBPM ensures a HIPAA compliant environment, and delivers prompt ROI using its AI enabled capabilities. Currently, the platform manages contracts worth over multibillion USD, drawing insights, saving costs, and elevating ROI, which supports reducing the cost of patient care.
Additionally, we believe that AI could be just the ticket to accelerate digital transformation in healthcare. Enabling AI in our core SaaS solution brings higher efficiency and productivity to our customers in the healthcare Industry to free up their valuable time to focus on providing patient care instead of manual administrative processes. While AffableBPM is currently serving many esteemed nonprofit healthcare providers and educational institutes, it has applicability across multiple industries, due to its flexible architecture for automating backend office operations.
[GG]: Indeed, we're excited for how AI can help accelerate digital transformation across industries. How is AffableBPM leveraging or planning to leverage AI in app development to enhance the value of your product?
[RV]: We are excited to be developing multiple product features leveraging AI services:
- AffableBPM Data Importer: This feature utilizes the Document Intelligence module in Azure AI services, automating metadata recognition in documents such as invoices and insurance policies. By leveraging the Document Intelligence module, the solution ensures accurate extraction of key information, reducing errors, and streamlining processes. It also seamlessly integrates with Lexmark printers and is certified for co-selling with Lexmark.
- Guardian Chatbot Copilot for Help Docs: The company is exploring the use of Azure OpenAI Copilot with generative AI and prompt flow to develop an integrated help chatbot. In collaboration with Microsoft ISV Services, this chatbot aims to streamline access to relevant product-related help and currently, a Proof of Concept (POC) is underway.
- AffableBPM Data Simplifyer: Developing a generative AI for data format matching, we leverage Azure NLP to further simplify data, particularly in standardizing claim data. Future plans involve converting or obtaining HL7 data for mapping into Azure Health Data Services, ensuring adherence to standard formats like FHIR.
- AffableBPM Process Mining: In alignment with our AI strategy, we utilize Power Automate process mining to uncover relationships between different customer-created business process workflows. This approach aims to extract higher business-centric analytics, bridging the gap between independently operating workflows for enhanced business insights.
[GG]: Collaboration across the industry and Microsoft partner ecosystem is so valuable in addressing customer needs. Can you share more about your business partnerships? How are these partnerships beneficial to accelerating app adoption?
[RV]: Within the Microsoft ecosystem, Lexmark is a significant player, and AffableBPM has established a strategic partnership with Lexmark to integrate the AffableBPM Data Importer solution into their smart multi-function printers. In such instances, we are considering the implementation of Multi-Party-Offer (MPO) to facilitate transactions through the Azure Marketplace. Furthermore, AffableBPM collaborates with non-Microsoft Managed Service Providers (MSP) or resellers who actively refer leads to us. These referrals contribute to MPO deals via the marketplace, expanding our reach beyond Microsoft affiliations. This approach ensures a diverse network of partnerships and transactions, enhancing the accessibility and adoption of the AffableBPM solution in various business ecosystems.
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Resources:
- Join the Microsoft #BuildFor2030 Initiative, a call-to-action for Microsoft partners to drive changemaking, innovation, and collective impact, to help advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Hear our partners’ perspective on participating.
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