Avaap: a Leading Global IT Services Provider

Dhiraj Shah founded Avaap in 2006 to address critical business gaps for organizations that rely on Infor Lawson as their mission-critical ERP. In 2011, Dhiraj made the decision to strategically focus on Infor software solutions. Under Dhiraj’s leadership, the company has experienced significant growth and exceeded its goals every year since its inception. Today, Avaap is among the largest Infor Alliances Partners.

In 2016, Avaap acquired Falcon Consulting, a KLAS-leading Epic Systems implementation and optimization firm. Avaap is the only Infor systems integrator with a dedicated EHR practice, providing healthcare customers with a single source solution for clinical, business and financial applications. Avaap employs more than 400 technology and business professionals across its locations, including offices in Edison, New Jersey, Chicago, St. Paul, MN, Spain, U.K. and Chennai, India. This growth is testament to Dhiraj’s vision and genuine desire to improve customer business practices through strategic partnerships and exceptional software services.

Avaap has earned several accolades including Infor Alliance Partner of the Year in 2014-2016; Infor Cloud and Net-New Sales Partner 2016; Infor Services Partner of the Year in 2013 and Infor 2012 Partner of the Year for Innovation. Avaap has also been recognized for its fast growth, including the Best in Biz award in the medium size business category; NJBIZ’s Fastest Growing Companies in New Jersey and a six-year honoree on the INC. 500 list of fastest growing private companies in the U.S.

Prior to Avaap, Dhiraj held several positions at Lawson Software. He was instrumental in developing Lawson’s offshore strategy by helping establish a global center of excellence in Chennai. He has spoken at numerous industry conferences including Inforum, Infor Partner Summit, INC. 500 conference, and the Kaplan Institute.  Dhiraj graduated with honors from New Jersey Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in professional communications. He is an active member of the Young Presidents’ Organization, a global networking organization of successful entrepreneurs.

Dhiraj has the unique talent for leveraging the latest technologies and conceptualizing them into turnkey solutions that drive better efficiency and efficacy for Avaap’s growing customer base. His deep industry knowledge has helped Avaap build a strong presence in the healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and public sector verticals, among others.

Kevin Cox is Executive Vice President of Global Sales, responsible overall for customer satisfaction, global business development, and growth across all Avaap products and services lines.

Kevin is a senior business executive with a track record over 25 years of leadership and results ensuring customers success, building high-performing sales teams, executing go-to-market strategies and delivering year-over-year growth. Focused primarily in Healthcare and Life Sciences, Kevin has a large network across health systems and plans, and the global business ecosystem. For the past 18 years, Kevin has specialized in helping customers realize value from their IT investments, including enterprise software and cloud services/SaaS transformations. His extensive background interacting with multiple industry segments, channels and alliances, complex organizational and competitive environments, and large user communities helps Kevin ensure effective business continuity and operational excellence. He offers deep experience leading teams in both large public global corporations, and private venture-backed early stage companies.

Before Avaap, Kevin was Chief Growth Officer at Health Payment Systems, an early stage cloud technology firm committed to transforming the healthcare consumers financial experience.

Prior to HPS, Kevin led sales for 12 years at Oracle Corporation, where he was most recently Vice President of Sales for Oracle’s North American Applications and SaaS businesses across Healthcare, Life Sciences and Higher Education. In this role, he had responsibility for all customers, partners and employees, and led the turn-around of under-performing divisions and the go-to-market transformation from on premise to SaaS. Earlier in his Oracle career, Kevin was selected to restructure their applications business in U.S. Healthcare where he led their expansion to a market leading #1 in KLAS, while progressively building a $100 million business unit.

Kevin began his sales leadership career at SmithKline, and held roles empowering people and expanding market-share at U.S. Surgical Corporation, McKesson Information Technology, and Lawson Software (now Infor).

Kevin received a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Business Management from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington’s Cameron School of Business. He is a regular speaker at conferences and events, and an active member with HFMA, Health 2.0, and HIMSS, and participated in 2015-16 on the HIMSS Revenue Cycle Improvement Task Force.

Adam Goldstein is vice president of ERP at Avaap, responsible for product architecture, development, support and all Infor software delivery. With 15 years of professional ERP experience specific to Infor Lawson, Adam brings expert-level knowledge of methodologies, processes, and tools to Infor Lawson ERP implementations.

Specialized as an Infor Lawson Solutions Architect, Adam possesses significant experience working on ERP implementations with roles ranging from technical lead to the detailed design and development of dashboards, reports, process automation, interfaces, conversions and extensions. He has deep understanding of Infor technologies and data structures and has worked on many projects that range variably in size and complexity.

Since joining Avaap in 2008, he has been highly leveraged as the architect for Avaap’s portfolio of turnkey solutions and dashboards, built with one key objective to seamlessly integrate with Infor Lawson customer environment. Under Adam’s direction, Avaap’s product portfolio features 12 solutions designed specifically to extend value and capabilities of Infor software.

Adam has an impeccable consulting track record due to his strong technical expertise and hands on approach. Most recently, he has defined a methodology to reduce the complexity of migrating to the cloud and adapted Avaap service delivery and consulting to support customer modernization efforts.

Prior to joining Avaap, Adam served as a senior consultant at Bearing Point, a multinational management and technology consulting firm, and as a Technology Consultant at Lawson Software. Adam has received numerous awards for his work and spoken at industry conferences such as CUE and INFORUM.

Andy Anderson serves as vice president, M3 Service Delivery, at Avaap. Andy joined Avaap in September 2012 to build a dedicated Infor M3 practice. Under his leadership, Avaap’s M3 team has grown to be the largest consulting team in the US of highly skilled, certified Infor M3 resources with a track record of successful implementations and upgrades for food processors, equipment rental and service, manufacturing and distribution organizations.

Andy brings more than three decades of IT and business experience and a proven track record of providing Infor Lawson and M3 consulting services. Prior to joining Avaap, Andy was a practice director at Lawson software for four years where he developed Lawson’s QuickStep implementation methodology, a solution that pre-configures core processes and minimizes the impact of implementations for an M3 customer.

Andy has sat on both sides of the desk as a vendor and client. Andy served as information technology director for Red Wing Shoe Company, an American manufacturing organization, and as the vice president of Americas M3 Users Group. His vast experience as a client and on vendor IT capabilities delivers a unique perspective on the challenges and objectives faced by clients and how to bridge the gap between the two.

Andy received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Moorhead State University.

As Vice President of Retail Services, Andy Cariveau is responsible for creating and driving programs for retail customers that generate significant revenue, expand market share, and position Avaap as partner of choice for Infor implementations in retail. Cariveau brings 15+ years of retail industry experience, starting his career at Retek (Oracle Retail) and specializing in merchandising, planning and inventory activities that enhance the customer experience.

Andy has a strong background working in multiple entrepreneurial environments. He joined Retek (Oracle Retail) prior to IPO and eventual acquisition by Oracle, playing lead roles in the development, implementation and integration of the Retek Merchandising System. Andy then played a crucial role in the growth of OLR, an Oracle Retail partner, helping the company grow from 10 to 100+ consultants where he hired, trained, mentored and managed the North American consultant base.  Andy works with retailers on the creation long-term sustainable solutions, ensuring smooth implementations and manageable maintenance.

Andy holds a MBA from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Gustavus Adolphus College.

Melissa Prusher is Vice President of Global Marketing where she is responsible for leading and managing all aspects of Avaap’s marketing, communications and brand management activities.

Melissa brings more than 25 years of experience planning, developing and executing marketing campaigns to support overall business strategies and meet sales objectives. Under her leadership, Avaap has grown to be the largest Infor Alliance Partner and the only Infor healthcare systems integrator with a dedicated EHR team focused on Epic.

Prior to joining Avaap, Melissa spent thirteen years in private practice as a content development and marketing strategy specialist for enterprise software vendors with an emphasis on best-of-breed HCM solutions, as well as supporting organizations in the healthcare, food and beverage, pharmaceutical and  beauty and fashion industries. Her work has been featured in the Human Resource Management Journal, Workforce Magazine, Wall Street Journal and other business publications. She is the recipient of numerous awards including best business blog by American Business Awards, the prestigious Davey International Award for best feature writing, and a Platinum MarCom award.

Melissa began her career with Clairol leading product publicity, strategic relationships and corporate communications. In this role she was responsible for creating the first online brand experience for a beauty company and served on the founding committee of New York’s fashion week, 7^th on Sixth.

Melissa received a Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Communication from the University of Hartford. She remains active in professional marketing organizations and the New Jersey technology community.

Rick Custodio is the Chief Financial Officer at Avaap responsible for accounting, financial planning and analysis, human resources, recruiting and IT/operations. Rick played key role in the acquisition and integration of Falcon Consulting, helping to establish Avaap EHR while creating synergies across the organization and opportunity for further growth and innovation.

Rick is a Senior Financial Executive with more than 20 years of experience in financial services, financial technology and enterprise software and services. As CFO, Rick is focused on working with the leadership team to create value throughout the organization, bringing accurate, insightful metrics and analysis, establishing measurable short and long-term plans as well as building partnerships throughout the company to drive its success.

Before joining Avaap, Rick was Senior Vice President of Finance at OpenLink, a leading developer of software solutions and support services providing trading, treasury and risk management solutions. Rick was responsible for establishing key business reporting, analytics and metrics while developing a high-performing global Financial Planning and Analysis function to support all business areas and provide key business drivers and insight to the board to support growth.

Prior to OpenLink, Rick was Managing Director of Finance at ITG, a global technology-enabled trading software and solutions provider where he held various senior financial roles during his 14-year tenure while supporting fast-paced growth from acquisitions, expansion into new asset classes and geography’s supporting new operations in Europe, Asia Pacific and Canada. He played a key role in supporting the company’s acquisition strategy, establishment of risk and controls, implementing financial and reporting system and streamlined processes across accounting operations as well as established the management reporting and Financial Planning and Analysis functions.

Rick began his career in a management training program at JP Morgan Chase, gaining valuable financial and operational experience in various areas of the bank including tax compliance, capital markets, financial and management reporting, financial MIS and global custody.

Rick has a BS of Finance from Rutgers University and an MBA in Management from Farleigh Dickinson University.

Paul Buonopane is Vice President of Avaap EHR where he is responsible for leading the strategic direction of Avaap’s revenue cycle and clinical optimization practices and in helping healthcare organizations align and optimize clinical and revenue cycle management practices to enhance patient and physician experiences, maximize cash collections and minimize cost to collect.

Paul brings 18+ years of experience assisting healthcare providers with both clinical and revenue cycle operational and systems transformation initiatives. Paul specializes in operations and information systems in academic medical centers, ambulatory care facilities including physician practices and hospital-based clinics, and multi-facility health systems. His areas of expertise include business process redesign, patient engagement and physician experience, clinical integrated network design and population health, revenue cycle net revenue improvement, enterprise data warehouse design and implementation, interim revenue cycle leadership, and Epic Systems risk mitigation, implementation and optimization.

Under his leadership, Avaap EHR (previously Falcon Consulting) earned Best in KLAS Category Leader for Revenue Cycle Optimization in 2017 and has been recognized as a KLAS-leading organization for three consecutive years. Paul brings sound financial leadership and deep industry perspective to help customers achieve positive cash flow and operational efficiencies while ensuring best clinical practices and compliance with established laws, regulations, practices and procedures.

Paul also served in Deloitte Consulting’s National Strategy and Operations Healthcare Provider Practice for more than a decade. He managed large-scale clinical and revenue cycle systems implementations and transformed the financial health of large academic medical centers through process redesign, implementation, monitoring and tracking of key performance indicators. Paul has been quoted in numerous industry publications, most recently in The Wall Street Journals’ CIO Journal.

Paul received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Finance from the University of Massachusetts. He is Six Sigma and DBA certified. Paul has spoken at industry conferences such as the Computer Electronics Show (CES) and is an active board member of Healthimation.

Michele Behme is Avaap’s vice president of Clinical EHR and a registered nurse with more than 30 years of clinical healthcare IT experience. In addition to significant hospital operational and leadership experience, Michele has led work with several major healthcare IT consulting firms supporting senior leadership, sales support, solution creation and served in client advisory and delivery roles. She brings a strong background in EHR implementation work, participating in single and multi-facility EHR implementation projects across the country in addition to Ambulatory and Hospital Affiliate program development. Michele understands the importance and challenges of pre-implementation planning, system selection, design workflow, clinical integration, application build, testing, training, go-live support, optimization analysis, CPOE, physician documentation, and clinical transformation.  Her experience leads to a better understanding of the impact technology has upon the financial, operational, functional and workflow needs of physicians, clinicians, end users, patients and healthcare systems as well as how data can drive change and improve outcomes.

As a member of senior leadership teams with several healthcare IT consulting companies, Michele had responsibility for the management, quality and growth of the clinical delivery team, building professional services and as an active participant in company operations, business development, project delivery, and client relationships. Michele and her team focus on the comprehensive services, methodology and tools designed to support clients on any phase of an EHR project lifecycle.

Michele holds a BSN from the University of Evansville, professional memberships in HIMSS, ANIA, ISNA, AONE in addition to  ANCC certifications in Nursing Informatics and Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing. She is certified in Epic Inpatient ClinDoc, Orders, Order Transmittal and Decision Support (2015) and also holds athenahealth GLS and CPL certifications. Additionally Michele serves as an Executive Advisor for a telehealth company, MilkOnTap.