Chandrashekar Kakal
Sr. Vice President & Global Head, Enterprise Solutions
Infosys Technologies
Excellence in TechnologyBuilding off of his more than 25 years of experience in the manufacturing industry, Chandrashekar Kakal became an expert in building ERP product modules. He’s translated that experience into an amazingly successful consulting career, where, for the last 12 years, he’s lead enterprise transformation with $1 billion dollars in revenue.
Kakal is now senior vice president, a member of the executive council and the global head of enterprise solutions at Infosys. He also sits on the board of Infosys Consulting. His team of 13,000 consultants constitute only 12 percent of Infosys Technologies’ global workforce, but deliver close to a quarter of the company’s revenues. The team’s client portfolio includes more than 350 of the global 1,000 corporations.
What’s truly remarkable is his ability to retain long-term client relationships. Nearly 95 percent of quarter-to-quarter revenue comes from repeat business.
“Accomplishing a program’s objectives ‘on-time, within budget’ is what the clients value the most in a consulting assignment, once the business value dimension is translated into a
defined program. A lead consultant’s ability to help client accomplish those objectives gets them chosen over others again and again,” he tells
Consulting.
“My first client through Infosys, a semiconductor company for which we delivered global supply chain processes 11 years ago, is our client even today. While the CIOs in that company changed a few times over, my relationship with the company continues,” he says. “Being on steering committees during execution of the program and bringing the program on track at every milestone is the key for a consultant to get acceptance and repeat business.”
Kakal has many secrets to repeat business success, but he says the keys are: Keeping track of the changing requirements of the client, identifying the opportunities of improvement in value creation processes, mapping the service offerings of the company to the client needs, combining consulting with execution, leveraging technology for quantum jump in benefits, and articulating and measuring the business value being offered.
—Jess Scheer
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