Oracle NetSuite has helped us to transform our Accounting, Customer Relationship Management, and Professional Services functions: Santhosh Madangarli, MD (APAC) & COO, Constellation Consulting Group

Santhosh Madangarli, Managing Director (APAC) & COO, Constellation Consulting Group, recently spoke with CXOToday about the company’s overall operations, digital landscape, innovative capabilities, and the decision to implement Oracle NetSuite. He went on to discuss how NetSuite has transformed processes and the business benefits achieved from the implementation.

1. Please elaborate on the operations of Constellation Consulting Group. What are some of the key industries that you serve in India?

Constellation Consulting Group is headquartered in Dubai, UAE, with India as the largest subsidiary. We also have subsidiaries in Egypt, Turkey, the UK and the USA. We are a partner and reseller of Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) products and services. Our major region from a business perspective is the Middle East. We have started working in the Indian market last year and have acquired a number of customers in a short span of time. We primarily work with the CFOs office across all industries to help them digitalize, automate, and streamline various business processes like Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting, Financial Consolidation and Close, Account Reconciliation, Management & Statutory Reporting, Tax Provisioning & Reporting, Profitability & Cost Management, to name a few.

2. Please share your perspective on the digital landscape and how Constellation Consulting Group is shaping up in the digital era? What are some of the key technologies on which Constellation Consulting relies to improve internal operations and increase efficiency?

We started our digitalization journey in early 2021. Our goal has always been to identify the right technology platforms to address Employee Engagement, Customer Relationship Management, Professional Services Automation, and General Ledger requirements so that we would be ready for the rapid business growth we expect in the next five years.

Since then we have been able to set up a digital landscape that includes:

• ZingHR – an employee self-service HR system to manage the Employee Lifecycle from Recruitment to Retirement
• HiFives – an Employee Rewards, Recognition, and Engagement Software Platform to digitalize, automate, and communicate employee engagement initiatives
• NetSuite & OpenAir – a combined platform for the Lead-to-Cash cycle, covering Sales Management, Project Management, and Revenue Management
• NetSuite – a platform for Accounting, Accounts Receivables Management, and Accounts Payable Management

With the current digital landscape and few components to be added soon like Management Dashboards, Budgeting & Forecasting Automation, Constellation Consulting Group is shaping up well in the digital era and prepared to offer new solutions and new technologies to businesses in new geographies such as Europe and North America, as well as our existing markets.

3. How do you ensure that the technological solutions you provide to your customers are scalable and can adapt with changing business needs?

Flexible architecture, modular design, and common data interfaces that can accommodate future expansions or changes are some of the factors we consider when we offer technological solutions to our customers. Other factors we take into consideration to ensure scalability and ever-changing business needs are user experience, cloud-based solutions that offer scalability and flexibility, design and build for future proactive enhancements, and monitoring of the solutions to ensure a consistently high level of performance.

4. What prompted Constellation Consulting Group to select Oracle NetSuite, and what functions have you transformed with the implementation?

When we started our digitalization journey around Apr 2021, our first goal was to identify the right technology to support our multi-national operations. Our requirements for the solution were that it should be:

• Flexible to suit our organization’s ever-changing requirements (rapidly growing in terms of headcount, regions, etc.)
• Able to handle complexity: different needs by different regions, yet at the same time user-friendly enough to be adopted by everyone within the organization
• Cloud-based so that we could focus on the platform and its features and not to worry about hardware, network, new versions, etc.

After an exhaustive study, we arrived at the conclusion that Oracle Netsuite & OpenAir combination would best serve our purpose. Over the past year of using the solution, and adding more enhancements as we go, we have seen true agility in action, as we keep getting increased benefits out of the system. NetSuite has helped us to transform our Accounting, Customer Relationship Management, and Professional Services functions, so far.

5. Please share specific use-cases of how Oracle NetSuite has helped Constellation Consulting Group in streamlining operations and improving decision-making.

• Oracle NetSuite & OpenAir implementation for Professional Services Automation helped us track and analyze budgeted and forecasted revenue and cost at the project level. This helped project managers in their decision-making related to project staffing, project timelines, cost management, and profitability improvement.
• Project-level resource allocation and forecast helped us to improve resource utilization and also provided visibility into resource needs and hiring
• We were using Salesforce to manage the sales process and orders, which was not integrated with the general ledger. Now we are using NetSuite for this purpose and are able to manage the lead-to-cash cycle, end-to-end, on a single platform.
• We were able to consolidate the financials at the department, country, and group level using NetSuite. This helped us to improve our decision-making based on department-wise and country-wise P&
• We were also able to improve our collections using the automated reminder process for invoices

6. What is your company’s vision for its digital roadmap in 2023 and beyond?

Our digitalization journey will continue in 2023 and beyond to include remaining business processes like Management Reporting, Budgeting & Forecasting, Service Management, and a few other excel based processes.  Our target is to fully digitalize, automate, and streamline all business processes in the next couple of years.