IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview Regarding the Tada Partnership

with Lakshmanan Chidambaram (popularly known as CTL), President of Americas Strategic Verticals

Chidambaram is a strategic thinker, business and digital transformation leader at Tech Mahindra. As the head of Tech Mahindra’s enterprise business in the Americas region, he has P&L responsibility for one of the largest business units and is responsible for the company’s growth and expansion across many verticals. In this role, CTL is also responsible for executing Digital Strategy and driving growth through Artificial Intelligence & Analytics, Customer Experience, Digital Engineering and Tech Mahindra’s Platforms.

Tech Mahindra, a provider of digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering services and solutions has partnered with Tada Cognitive Solutions (TADA), a next generation digital twin-enabled supply chain software provider. This new partnership allows Tech Mahindra’s customers to build real-time end-to-end visibility across supply chain networks while controlling tower implementations and accelerating their digital transformation journey. Consequently, these offerings will empower various enterprises to leverage greater potential of digital technology such as manufacturing, consumer packaged goods and retail enterprises.

Q. Starting broadly, can you please give us some background information about Tech Mahindra, yourself, and what services and solutions the company provides to various industries?

Tech Mahindra offers innovative and customer-centric digital experiences, enabling enterprises, associates, and the society to Rise. We are a $6 billion organization with more than 158,000 professionals across 90 countries helping 1,260+ global customers, including Fortune 500 companies. We are focused on leveraging next-generation technologies including 5G, blockchain, quantum computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and more, to enable end-to-end digital transformation for global customers. We support enterprises across almost all major industries but a few of focus industries are: retail and consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, travel and transportation, BFSI, communications, media and entertainment, oil and gas, healthcare and life sciences, and public sector.

We are the fastest growing brand in ‘brand strength’ and amongst the top 7 IT brands globally. With the NXT.NOW^TM framework, Tech Mahindra aims to enhance the ‘Human Centric Experience’ for our ecosystem and drive collaborative disruption with synergies arising from a robust portfolio of companies. Tech Mahindra aims to deliver tomorrow’s experiences today and believes that the “Future is Now.”

Q. The recently announced partnership with Tada Cognitive Solutions enables the management of supply chain risk while also improving productivity and flexibility for clients. Will you please elaborate on what clients can expect from this and how will this partnership accelerate digital transformation in supply chain operations?

Our customers across manufacturing and distribution are facing unforeseen disruptions throughout the value chain and therefore need a way to ensure near real-time visibility, and the ability to collaborate and orchestrate data flows and decisions across various functions. The digital supply chain network framework will allows our customers to deliver all these and more through a set of applications and modules created on top of a composite digital twin of their enterprise supply chain. 

The partnership will combine Tech Mahindra’s deep domain expertise and system integration capabilities with Tada Cognitive Solutions’ patented Digital Twin of the Supply Chain (DTSC) and Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO) to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation journey. The joint efforts will enable supply chain transformation programs focused on delivery orchestration, collaboration and end-to-end visibility across the entire supply chain by connecting internal and external data from disparate systems in a matter of weeks. It will also provide supply chain execution level analytics, and scenario building capabilities.

Q. How does this partnership deliver new and differentiated value to the marketplace? Why is the solution relevant/important today?

Speed to value creation is our biggest differentiator in the market today. The traditional way of deploying control towers can take years and in a way defeats the purpose of the supply chain transformation program. Because our composite digital twin-based control towers are modular and have been perfected for most industry sectors, deploying these assets could take as little as 10 weeks. Our partnership has built industry blueprints for most supply chains, so deployment is focused primarily on understanding the supply chain language / semantics of your organization. We also have connectors for most large ERPs and the latest transportation visibility management systems.

Q. How have recent supply chain disruptions and other challenges informed the development of this joint solution?

Supply chains today have become complex with organizations struggling to harness their true potential in building a seamless experience. Supply chain operations are often distributed over disparate data silos, while complex data management and data cleansing make it very challenging for supply chain professionals to work and prepare for the upcoming business challenges. With our DTO-enabled control towers, customers can focus on proactive supply chain management. The joint solution gives a 360-degree view of risks, demands and challenges, and offers intelligent alerts and analytics, giving businesses the opportunity to plan and prepare.

Q. Could you elaborate on why CPG, manufacturing, and retail are the ideal sectors to benefit from the Tech Mahindra-Tada solution? Will the solution offer value to other industries?

Because we have the underlying organization architecture to create a DTO for most variations of companies within the manufacturing, retail and CPG sectors, our initial focus is to deliver this DTO-enabled control tower solution within these two sectors. The capability can and should be used for other industries, and we are actively exploring opportunities in other industry verticals.

As control towers are becoming increasingly predominant in the supply chain ecosystem with an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.7% from 2020 to 2027 globally, customers need to be connected by a common digital framework across their business networks. Ongoing volatility and disruption of global supply chains requires businesses to adopt control centers that can effectively identify and respond to risks in real-time. This partnership not only gives customers the power to respond to threats quicker, but it also gives businesses peace of mind that their supply chain is protected.

Lakshmanan Chidambaram, President of Americas Strategic Verticals

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