The company
Air Liquide Medical Systems India (ALMS India) was established in 2008 following the acquisition of a local company. It is the Indian medical systems arm of the global Air Liquide group, a publicly traded manufacturer of industrial and medical gases listed on the Euronext Paris exchange, operating across 59 countries with approximately 65,000 employees and more than 4.3 million customers and patients worldwide.
ALMS India manufactures and services medical systems for hospitals and healthcare providers across the country. While product sales are part of the business, the operation is anchored heavily around service maintenance. This post-sales business covers annual maintenance contracts (AMC), comprehensive maintenance contracts (CMC), warranty and non-warranty servicing, and spare parts sales. With over 45 service locations and 75+ field engineers across India, the service maintenance business carries both the scale and the complexity that define day-to-day operations at ALMS India.
The challenge
Before the latest implementation, ALMS India managed its service maintenance operations through Excel spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, and Word documents. Accounting sat in Tally, but Tally operated as a standalone ledger. It had no connection to the company’s service operations, inventory movements, or commercial workflows. Cost valuations were also maintained separately in Excel. There was no way to tie a spare part dispatch to an invoice, or an AMC period to actual service costs, without manual reconciliation across multiple systems. Everything outside basic bookkeeping—like service scheduling, inventory tracking, quote preparation, and invoicing triggers—lived in spreadsheets or in people’s inboxes.
The consequences were tangible. Quote preparation took 7 to 10 days because the commercial team had no direct visibility into stock availability and had to go back and forth with the inventory team before committing to timelines. The finance team regularly missed invoicing deadlines; quarterly, fortnightly, and milestone-based invoices would sit as quotes or sale orders because there was no automated trigger to move them forward. As a result, cash flow suffered.
Inventory management was equally problematic. Without live stock data, the team overstocked at some locations while running short at others. The commercial team would commit to delivery timelines only to find that the inventory team had already allocated stock to a different customer. Spare parts would be transferred to service engineers and the corresponding revenue would not make it into the books, often written off under the assumption that it fell under a warranty or AMC period. Revenue was leaking from post-sales services with no mechanism to catch it.
Management also had limited insight into the operational picture. Because Tally only captured what was manually entered into it, and because service data, inventory movements, and contract details lived elsewhere, there was no consolidated view of the business. There was no way to track, at a serial-number level, how many faults a particular product had, how many maintenance calls it generated, or how much was being spent on spare parts during a given contract period. Even service engineer performance data did not exist in any consolidated form.
The organization needed to replace this fragmented setup—Tally included—with a single, connected system that could handle accounting, invoicing, inventory, procurement, and service management in one place.
The solution
The consulting team at SriSattva, a Zoho partner, implemented a solution built around Zoho Books as the central hub for ALMS India’s service maintenance operations. Zoho Books handled all accounting, invoicing, and billing workflows, while Zoho Inventory managed stock levels and fulfillment, Zoho CRM tracked service cases and commercial workflows, and Zoho Expense handled procurement and reimbursements. Zoho Flow connected the pieces where custom automation was needed.
The design principle was deliberate; not all data needed to flow everywhere. Role-based access ensured that each team saw only what was relevant to them. Inventory details stayed with the supply chain team. Profit and loss information remained with finance. The commercial team in CRM could see stock quantities at different warehouses without accessing the full inventory module.
How the workflow came together
All the master data was created and maintained in Zoho Books. This data synced automatically into Zoho CRM through the native integration, giving the commercial team what they needed to prepare quotes without manual hand-offs.
When a service case came in, the commercial team logged it in CRM and prepared a quote. Because stock availability from Zoho Inventory was visible directly in CRM, they could commit realistic timelines on the spot. Quote preparation time dropped from 7–10 days to as low as 1–3 days.
Once a quote was approved by the relevant manager in CRM, a sale order was automatically created in Zoho Books—no manual re-entry, no data lost in transit. SriSattva built a custom script and button that pushed the entire record from CRM into Books upon manager approval.
Automated invoicing in Zoho Books
This was where the real impact on cash flow materialized. SriSattva set up workflow rules in Zoho Books for both partial and full invoicing. Based on predefined parameters like contract milestones, delivery stages, and time intervals, the invoices were automatically generated and placed in draft status. The finance team no longer had to remember which invoices were due. Drafts appeared in their queue, ready for review, internal approval, and dispatch through e-invoicing.
Previously, invoices would sit forgotten as sale orders for weeks. With the automated draft creation, that gap closed entirely.
Collections and credit control
When a customer did not pay within the defined period, Zoho Books triggered email reminders automatically. In parallel, a notification was pushed back into Zoho CRM, alerting the commercial team to follow up. SriSattva added an additional layer: If a customer had overdue invoices, any new quote created for that customer in Zoho CRM required an extra level of managerial approval before it could proceed. This prevented the company from extending further credit to customers who had not settled previous dues.
Inventory and procurement
When a sale order was confirmed in Zoho Books, inventory was automatically reserved in Zoho Inventory to prevent double allocation. Transfer orders were created in draft, ensuring the inventory team had the dispatch in their queue rather than relying on email reminders alone. Reorder levels were monitored in real time, replacing the Excel-based tracking that had led to overstocking and missed replenishments.
Zoho Expense was linked to handle procurement and employee reimbursements, with custom workflows that captured additional data points and created draft transfer orders based on expense submissions.
Reporting and insights through Zoho Books
SriSattva built extensive custom reports within Zoho Books to give management visibility that had never existed before. Serial-number-level tracking showed how many faults, complaints, and maintenance calls each product generated. Spare parts consumption was broken down by AMC, CMC, and warranty periods, revealing the true servicing cost per product. The team could now identify which products were generating disproportionate service costs and which engineers were repeatedly ordering similar spare parts. These were patterns that pointed to either product reliability issues or training gaps.
All standard Zoho Books features were fully utilized alongside these custom reports and workflows. The data was also connected to Zoho Analytics for executive dashboards with both numerical and chart-based reporting.
Benefits and ROI
The implementation delivered results across several fronts.
Spare parts and service revenue increased significantly: The transparency of the new system eliminated the revenue leakage that had been occurring when spare parts transfers were absorbed under warranty or AMC assumptions without proper accounting. Every transaction now flowed through Zoho Books with clear documentation of contract dates, service types, and billing status.
Quote cycle compressed from 7–10 days to 1–3 days: Automated invoicing eliminated missed billing cycles. Collections improved through systematic follow-ups and the credit control workflow that flagged overdue customers before new commitments were made.
Inventory holding costs dropped: With real-time visibility into stock levels, reorder points, and pending orders, the team stopped overstocking as a hedge against uncertainty. Cost valuations that had previously been maintained in Excel were now accurate and current within Zoho Inventory, tied directly to the financial records in Zoho Books.
Clerical workload reduced significantly: The company was able to redeploy staff from data entry tasks to higher-value work. Cross-team coordination improved because the system executed hand-offs automatically. The commercial team, finance team, and inventory team no longer needed to chase each other through emails and phone calls.
Management gained real-time dashboards: Tracking product reliability, engineer performance, spare parts consumption, and contract profitability can be done through dashboards. This produced insights that had simply not been available before.
Looking forward
The first module went live in March 2025. By October 2025, the entire platform was fully stabilized. KPMG, the company’s auditor, completed a seamless half-yearly review that month. It was the first conducted entirely on the new system. Support tickets from users had tapered off, replaced by requests for new features rather than help with existing ones.
SriSattva is currently working with ALMS India on a second phase focused on bringing the company’s main product data—which still sits outside Zoho—into the system. The long-term vision is to have the entire product lifecycle, from primary sale through end-of-life servicing, managed within the Zoho ecosystem with Zoho Books at its core.
