Posted by:
Invenio
Publish Date:
11 May, 2026
This month, AVP of Project Management at Invenio, Prashant Waghmare joins us. Prashant has taken some time out from solving customer business challenges to share with us some of the pioneering projects he’s working on to transform our processes and help our customers operate more efficiently. In this interview, he discusses pioneering SAP public cloud initiatives, lessons learned from global delivery, and how emerging technologies like AI and ML are helping enhance the efficiency of Invenio customers all around the world.
For more than two decades, Prashant has led challenging, demanding, high intensity SAP transformation programs across a multitude of sectors.
Prashant has been with Invenio for five and a half years. He originally joined us to work on a project with Universal Media Group, overseeing the deployment of their Uniport platform in more than 8 territories.
These days, Prashant is turning his extensive SAP experience to helping Invenio deliver a seamless and professional service infused with learnings from SAP transformations all around the world.
Q: Prashant, tell us how you got into working in SAP supply chain solutions.
“I started out working with Bristlecone, which delivers global supply chain solutions for customers that included the Mahindra group. I’ve worked in Asia, Singapore, and the US, and spent more than 10 years working in the UK, before returning to India.
In that time, I worked as a consultant for Mahindra & Mahindra and delivered transformation projects for Cambridge University Press, Phillips Healthcare, Sony Asia Pacific and Birds’ Eye, to name just a few.”
Q: Prashant, tell us about how you’re making changes at Invenio.
"At Invenio, I’ve been building up SAP public cloud offshore capability at Invenio. Moving to SAP Public Cloud enables us to deliver optimal engagements to each of our customers and it’s given us a great opportunity to run through the practices and processes we use for all of our external customers in granular detail. While the success of these processes have been proven time and again, over the years, seeing it from a customer’s point of view, has been a very interesting and useful experience and enabled us to build and evolve the process.
This move to SAP Public Cloud has given us the added advantage of leveraging, on a corporate scale, other exciting technologies, such as Jira, to help support the running of our projects."
Q: You’ve worked with SAP for many years, but how did you come to take your first steps into SAP Public Cloud deployment?
"More and more businesses are making the switch to SAP Public Cloud and, with support for ECC ending, more businesses are recognising the need to make the move. Transitions can be challenging, but I recognised that getting up-to-speed with public cloud was essential, and I could bring a good deal of experience to these transformations.
I completed training and achieved certifications to underpin on the job training from my friends and colleagues within Invenio.
Working alongside people who really are leaders in their field, I was able to build on my existing SAP foundations and develop an in-depth understanding of the public cloud environment.
My first SAP Public Cloud project is the ongoing rollout of SAP Public Cloud, within Invenio.
Q: You’ve clearly worked with a good number of different customers. What values do you think customers appreciate when they work with you?
I’m always completely open and honest with the customers. If there’s a problem, I’ll call it a problem. By recognising it for what it is, we can move on to resolution faster. If you don’t confront an issue in this way, the problem won’t simply go away.
Another thing that I feel is really important when working with customers is speaking the customer’s language. There’s no point baffling a customer with science and speaking technical jargon that no one understands. Working across a variety of industries that includes automotive, electronics, publishing, healthcare, frozen foods and media, I learned to speak a universal language that everyone understands.
I find that treating customers as long-term partners from the outset aligns expectations early on, cutting out rework and reducing time-draining escalations.
Q: Do you ever take inspiration from products you use in customer projects to improve Invenio processes?
Many organisations these days struggle with real-world challenges such as eliminating waste, or identifying fraud. It’s these typical business issues (or more bespoke ones) that I love to work with.
Solving real-world problems is something I find very exciting. When we see our customers working with the go lives, happy with the result of our transformations — those are the things I find really fulfilling.
One example of this was our integration of Jira across the business.
Jira is a project management tool that provides granular visibility at a project level. It also enables each step within the project to be documented in a single source of truth for auditability and improved governance.
some of our projects were already using Jira, but in recent months, we’ve moved most of our software engineers onto Jira, with 375 of our 400 Jira licenses now in use. We’ve put a governance model in place to make workflow process changes and validate any change requests.
Q: You’ve been working alongside Naveen and Saritha to drive forward solutions on AI and MLs. Tell me about some of the exciting things you’ve been working on.
Our most recent project is very exciting! It uses AI and Machine learning to screen and validate invoices as they come into a business, reducing the time spent reviewing and validating invoices, eliminating bottlenecks and human error in the validation process, and reducing unnecessary loss. We’re hoping that Invoice Shield will enable our customers to stop having to provision for loss through false or incorrect invoicing.
Keep an eye out, as it won’t be long before these exciting new applications will be available to start saving your business money.