India's top engineering research and development services company L&T Technology Services has grown at breakneck pace in the last five years from $70 million revenue in 2009 to a run rate of $500 million now, outpacing the industry growth rate. This growth can mainly be attributed to capable leadership, strong workforce with engineering and domain background and the strong legacy of the parent.
Dr Keshab Panda, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of L&T Technology Services, says the company is betting high on the fast emerging digital engineering space to capitalize on the growing global market, in an exclusive interview with
BW Businessworld: Excerpts:
Q. Let's begin with what is differentiating L&T Technology Services from others?Our end-to-end domain expertise backed by the parent's (Larsen & Toubro) rich engineering heritage is one of the biggest advantages that our company holds over others. We are the number one pure play ER&D provider and no one understands industrial manufacturing and plant engineering as good as us. Our capabilities in smart manufacturing help us serve multiple Fortune 500 customers in plant engineering projects. We have significantly invested in smart manufacturing infrastructure. The recently inaugurated smart manufacturing lab in Vadodara, displays a wide range of technologies in the areas of smart control and automation, Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled mobility solutions as well as digital technologies supporting operation and maintenance of plants. Our range of expertise in IoT is spread evenly across all key industries, including transportation, industrial products, medical and telecom.
Q. How do you see smart solutions adding to the company's revenue growth globally?Smart solution offerings encompass the entire ecosystem of products, services and manufacturing. These solutions are aimed at reducing time to market, increase efficiencies, enhance customer satisfaction - thus enable increase in revenues for our customers. A big component of smart solutions is Smart Manufacturing including Industrie 4.0 with which we bring together modern technology such as cyber physical, collaborative robotics, augmented reality, and cloud computing & engineering analytics. We are one of the early movers in futuristic technology such as green energy, collaborative robotics and we are also at the forefront of the smart city revolution. In 2015, we launched our suite of smart city solutions at the Hannover Messe, the world's largest industry fair. Some examples are our proprietary iBEMS, a smart building framework, or e-health solution enabling high quality home or our IoT/M2M Middleware framework UBIQWeise that helps in moving data securely.
Q. What are the new projects and products in the pipeline?We are working on several innovative products that will roll out in 2018-20. There are strategic partnerships with customers and acquisition plans afoot to enhance our capabilities by means of technology edge, access to new markets and clients. The next level of growth and visibility is also envisaged through the company's listing process. Stay tuned for new centres of excellence, exciting engineering design and breakthrough technologies.
Q. What are your future growth drivers?We have set our strategic priorities along the lines of multi-vertical strategy, strategic account management, enhanced account farming, quality delivery and productivity and increasing our footprint in Europe with nearshore delivery centers. We see a lot more business potential in taking the company to newer heights with our focused and strategic approach and one major factor in growth is customer satisfaction, which is above 85 per cent, and large customers' trust on our domain expertise and innovative culture. We have also grown through selective acquisitions (Dell Engineering Services) and JVs (Thales Software India Pvt Ltd,) and expanding our markets in new areas and geographies. Future growth drivers are certainly plant automation using IoT, cloud and engineering analytics and innovation using data analytics, sensor technology and machine-to-machine communication capabilities.
Q. How are you building the next rung of leadership?We have already built up an aggressive management team. Most of these senior management executives are award winning professionals in their respective domains and well respected in the industry. Excellent support from top management and the leadership team with extensive domain experience is critical for IIOT and IOT. Key people among the leadership team across Industrial, Telecom & Hi-Tech, Process, Medical, Transportation and Product besides leaders in sales, marketing, technology, HR and finance, all have diverse and very long industry experience. We have also moved from calendar to competency based programs for four career stages.
Our streamlined strategies help us in growing the business to the next horizon. Unlike other engineering services firms, we are proud to have 17 per cent of women employees across our organization, and we want to take this ratio to 25 per cent in the coming years.
