Special Interview with Deepak Narayanan, CEO & CO-Founder, Practus
Today, they have transformed into an implementation-first performance improvement consulting firm that has deployed 5-million man hours of work with its clients and has returned more than $200 million in ROI for them.
They specialize in filling the gap between strategy and implementation for firms across the globe, with our headquarters in Mumbai, and offices spread across MENA and North America. Their key differentiator being the focus on being implementation partners rather than a diagnostic and recommendation-oriented consultancy, which has been the status quo of the consulting industry for some time now, and is up for disruption.
Most importantly, Practus is about delivering results through tangible business outcomes with an ROI promise. ROI for us is defined in terms of four metrics – impact the revenue growth of our clients, help them improve profitability, unlock or free up their cash flows, and lastly, help them unlock their enterprise valuation.
All their offerings, whether it is Analytics, Digital Transformation, Functional Transformation, or Manufacturing Excellence, focus on achieving the business goals of our clients. All our projects solve a business problem for our clients. That’s how Practus differentiates itself.
How has technology transformed the consulting industry across the globe?
Technology is the cornerstone for all consulting solutions today. This is especially true of the solutions originating from India, parts of Asia, East Europe and South America. The reason is that while these countries have achieved parity in terms of technological prowess, they offer it at a cost advantage to clients, regardless of where they are located. These solutions are just as tech-driven and sophisticated as anything else in the market and are definitely transforming the consulting industry.
On a global scale, technology has effectively introduced new service lines and revenue streams which consulting firms hitherto didn’t have. It has unleashed massive efficiency gains – both for consulting firms as well as their clients. Also, it helps consulting firms build tools, frameworks and IPs which they can use to drive repeatability when it comes to delivering certain solutions across clients. This reduces the time to results while keeping the quality intact.
At Practus, we believe that technology is an enabler and equalizer. While it keeps evolving, it is just one of the means to an end. We are focused really on solving business problems, and business problems can be solved through multiple modes. Technology happens to be one of the modes through which we solve these problems.
How technology is enhancing consulting firms’ ability to provide data-driven recommendations and make better-informed decisions for their clients? (AI, Big data, cloud computing, blockchain,etc.)
The benefits of AI, Big Data and Cloud Computing all depend on data. Every company can be classified into three tiers based on its level of data maturity. At a basic level, it’s just the datapoints and there’s lots of data available today in any organization. Now this data may not mean anything because it is in an unprocessed form. The first job for companies is to figure out whether they can convert this data into organized information. The raw data has to mean something so that a company may make sense of the data. After they can start to make sense of the data, by translating it into information, they can turn this information into insights. Unveiling how various datapoints interact and affect each other. That’s where you understand the real power that data can really unleash and put it to practice.
So the journey from data points to actionable insights is where consulting firms can play a massive role given the skill gaps that companies have, the lack of time, and in general the inability to achieve actionable insights which can drive business decisions. So that’s where technology can play a role for consulting firms. Gen-AI for instance, has been a revelation and we know companies are increasingly using AI to power their insights. The beauty of Gen-AI is that you can integrate not just your internal sources of information or your first-party data but you can also pull data from external sources.
Which in the past, I’m not saying that companies were not doing, but now with this technology it is far easier to pull or to capture this data and to be able to generate meaningful insights. This has become a possibility because it works on a learning methodology and training. So, the more you train the model, the better it becomes over a period of time and the insights that it generates become that bit more insightful, and yield better results.
How are consulting firms adapting their services to address these disruptions and integrate new technologies into their client solutions?
Consulting firms don’t have a choice. They must integrate all new breakthroughs that technology happens to bring along to really add value to the business outcomes of their clients. The pace at which newer technologies are coming through, and the type of business problems, business model changes, or disruptions that client organizations are seeing, consulting firms have no choice but to adapt to these changes. This is the way to stay relevant because it’s not about beating competition but maintaining parity.
Some of the ways in which consulting firms are doing this is reshaping their business models – investing more not just in technology, but in the organizational skill development that keeps them at the cutting-edge of technology powered solutions. A lot of consulting firms are reskilling their people. Gone are the days when consulting firms could have strategic partnerships with few technology companies. It used to be that a consulting firm had a partnership with a Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP. Now, I think the innovation is not necessarily coming from large tech companies. It’s coming from new-age startups. Now, if you need to solve business problems or adapt to changing business models, you had better start working not just with big boys but be open to working with technologies or with products or with tools that are coming through the door. That’s one way in which adaptation needs to happen.
How do you envision your path unfolding in 2024?
2024 and even beyond, there are a few strategic pillars for Practus to get us to where we want to be. One clear strategic pillar for us is to focus on our people – skilling or reskilling them. Internally, we have launched ‘Gurukool’, which aims to make learning fun, enjoyable, and cool. Everyone in the organization is being put through this exercise over a period of time. So the tenure they have spent, the experience that they have, the clients that they have managed, all that is disregarded right now. The core objective of the company right now is to better equip our people with relevant skills. So Gurukool is one of our keystone initiatives.
Looking outwards, another strategic pillar for us is creating methodologies and frameworks to be able to deliver innovative client solutions that add tangible value to their business. Not only does it help us, but it also enables our clients to start thinking about their problems and potential solutions in an organized structure. That’s another initiative that we are really focused on.
The third and the last one is to create more IPs. These IPs and tools are useful for clients in a manner that helps them deploy solutions faster, and enables us to deliver impact on their business faster. At the same time, these IPs and tools allow our teams to up their game because they don’t have to start from scratch every time they are on a project and can spend their time adding value to the business or solving a problem.
Those are the three broad initiatives that we are working on every day.