Atliis 360: Leading Business-First Digital Transformation Initiatives

Paul Edwards, CEO

There is no alternative to digital transformation. Visionary companies will carve out new strategic options for themselves — those that don’t adapt will fail.” At the moment, these words by Jeff Bezos’ sound more appropriate than ever as the COVID-19 pandemic has compelled every business across the globe to operate digitally. As soon as the pandemic struck, digital transformation initiatives suddenly paced up as many organizations had to move their operations online within days. Consequently, businesses across almost all industries now realize the significance of digital transformation.

However, not all of them have been able to reap the maximum possible benefits of it. When COVID hit, many found organizations found themselves without a digital transformation strategy and without the time to devise a new digital strategy and implement it appropriately. Another major challenge organizations face is that the IT industry commonly witnesses solution providers that offer clients only one piece of software -usually, the one which earns them the highest commission - and then try to make the client’s business fit the features of that software. This almost certainly guarantees a sub-optimal result that often ends in a failed implementation, a significant amount of wasted time and money, and a depressed client.

An industry-focused on software-first solutions for their short-term profit instead of maximizing the long-term benefit to their client’s business through the conscientious application of digital transformation became the underlying reason for Perth-based Atliis 360’s vision to offer “business-first digital solutions.”

Atliis 360 was born out of two pre-existing companies—a software development business and a managed IT firm. And COVID, too, provided the environment and impetus for the Atliis 360 team to pick its dream team of professionals, most of whom bring over 25years of experience in their respective fields.

The team at Atliis 360 adopts the core philosophy of delivering an optimized digital solution for each client, rather than the more common one size fits all approach. “We provide each client with a solution based on the unique requirements of their company’s business activities and people, not the underlying technology utilized to deliver it,” explains Mr. Paul Edwards, CEO at Atliis 360. The company’s professionals take the time to develop an understanding of the client’s day-to-day operation and thereafter develop an optimized digital solution, before selecting the appropriate technology and software to power it. An approach which plays a critical role in ensuring that the client receives an independent and pragmatic service, which is vendor agnostic.

Digital-Transformation-as-a-Service

Atliis 360 drives the trend of Digital-Transformation-as-a-Service (DTaaS) in the industry. DTaaS leverages agile methodologies to deliver digital transformation via manageable monthly sprints continuously. This is a significant departure from traditional digital transformation programs which often try to deliver extensive company-wide change in a matter of months.

Atliis 360 focus on continuous improvement through DTaaS - to maximizes the benefit achieved for clients in the same way as compound interest - where 1% achieved every month builds on itself to provide much greater value over a longer-term, than 12% all in one hit

“DTaaS maximizes the benefit for clients inthe same way as compound interest, where 1% achieved every month builds on itself to provide much greater value over a longer-term, than 12% all in one hit,” explains Mr. Edwards.

“DTaaSalso helps to ensure that clients do not become overwhelmed by the scope of work they need to do, and reduces the amount of change management required for a given project,” he said.

Atliis 360 delivers this agility to clients through a proprietary DT methodology, which focuses on faithfully replicating the real-world aspects of their company within its digital solution. The Atliis 360 team applies this methodology in four ways—consolidate, automate, innovate, and operate.

In each of its projects, the professionals identify the client’s requirements, view the business's data across various systems, both internal and third-party, and finally look at the hardware and software used by the client’s staff to operate. The Atliis 360 team thereafter provides a business-first system design, which is optimized across three tiers - line of business, integration& automation, and specialized software systems - that together serve as a consolidated stack. The integration & automation tier is arguably the most important, with most solutions offered by Atliis 360 including functionality to unshackle the customers’ staff from the repetitive and mundane tasks they usually had to perform daily. The company also specializes in creating custom software solutions via Microsoft’s Power platform to deliver a unified interface for client-specific functionality that spans multiple core business systems and acts as a centralized hub for IoT data. This proves critical in ensuring improvements in the client’s day-to-day operations and optimizing productivity.

In a nutshell, the solutions developed byAtliis 360 provide clients with the digital tools necessary agility to continuously transform the way their company operates and out-pace the ever-increasing expectations of their customers. “For everyone at Atliis 360, this is the true definition of digital transformation,” said Mr. Edwards.

Delivering Efficiencies through Custom-Built Solutions

Atliis 360’s business-first approach and its technologies have significantly benefitted clients across a broad spectrum of applications. One commonly delivered solution is used to automate the processing of documents such as supplier invoices. The end-to-end automation of the AP process starts typically with identifying emails containing supplier invoices. The invoice and complex line-item information from these documents are automatically extracted using AI (not OCR) technology developed by Rossum. The company then further validates this information before writing it to the client’s accounting/ERP system and then delivering additional automation to assist AP staff with the next stages of the AP process. This entire process is controlled via a custom-built app for each client which can be used to process any document, including credit notes, purchase orders, shipping documents, and more. It can even process custom document types and extract custom data fields.

By contrast, one of the more unusual requests involved the use of cameras and AI (computer vision) to measure and weigh chickens as they grow.

Another increasingly common solution maximizes the accuracy and speed at which products are processed in and out of a warehouse. In this instance, camera-based AI technology from Logivations is built into a custom software solution from Atliis 360 that is fully integrated with the client’s ERP or warehouse management system. In the resulting solution (for goods out), an employee passes one or more products under the system's camera which in milliseconds, confirms the correct product has been picked and shows the operator where to pack it in the shipping carton to achieve the smallest overall shipping volume.

A more specific exemplification of how beneficial Atliis 360’s solutions are can be presented with the company’s association with a leading Australian heavy equipment hire company. In this case, the client was seeking to improve the number of on-time payments to suppliers and the overall AP efficiency. As part of a thorough initial investigation, Atliis 360’s professionals identified multiple contributing factors to the overall problem. These included a reliance on manual identification of supplier invoices within the AP department’s inbox and manual transfer of invoices to the current OCR-based invoice processing system, which further complicates the process due to poor`order data extraction accuracy. The Atliis 360 team also witnessed bottlenecks in the overall process due to the complexity of coordinating activities and staff interactions across staff at the headquarters and the client’s 20+branch offices. To address these issues, Atliis 360 provided multiple solutions including Rossum.ai for AI-powered extraction of data from invoices (and other documents) and MS Power Automate to automate the processes and data exchange. The company also used MS Power Apps (portals) to deliver a business-wide control center that consolidates all of the client’s bespoke functionality into a unified solution across all device types, today and forever. These solutions not only ensured automatic sorting of the AP department shared mailbox to select emails containing supplier invoices but also delivered built-in data validation, phishing protection, and avoidance of duplicate invoices. “The results of this association to date indicate that the solution will achieve its objectives, deliver a ROI in less than 12 months, and unlock an ongoing annual productivity increase equivalent to approximately three fulltime employees,” proudly remarks Mr. Edwards.
Such projects and the way the Atliis 360 team deals with them time and again highlights the fact that the firm focuses on the business-benefits that technology can deliver to clients, rather than the more common IT industry practice of focusing solely on the technology itself. This ethos stands Atliis 360 apart, clearly distinguishing it from other players in the industry.

All in all, for Atliis 360 team, it’s all about assisting customers in their digital transformation journey - from identifying the optimum solution to helping them implement and operate the solution effectively - to reduce costs, improve efficiency and ultimately, to maximize their profits and growth. And as the industry continues to witness the usage of new technologies and changing customer requirements, the company actively adopts new trends and technologies. “An exciting aspect of our business is that technology, especially AI, continues to change in line with Moore’s Law.Automated process discovery, streaming databases and a host of other cool things are happening in this space, all of which will help us to provide continuous improvement to our clients for many years to come,” emphasizes Edwards.