Srikanth
Venkat Vishwanathan, Founder & Chairman, LatentView Analytics Ltd.
Venkat Viswanathan is chairman and founder of LatentView Analytics, a global digital analytics consulting and solutions firm. Venkat’s vision came to life in 2006 when he founded the company, well before the world caught on about the complexity and power of using large data sets to influence critical business decisions. This is when he noticed an emerging opportunity in the analytics industry and decided to venture into entrepreneurship. Before launching LatentView, Venkat was a successful Manager of Business Development at Cognizant Technology Solutions.
From 2006 to 2014, Venkat served as LatentView’s CEO and was a pioneer in the field of analytics in India, paving the way for other companies that followed in LatentView’s footsteps. Under his leadership, LatentView grew to become one of the most respected, largest, and fastest-growing data analytics firms globally. During the 2008 global recession, Venkat’s traditional and conservative approach to business influenced his decision to keep the company bootstrapped, not seeking external funding. Despite the economic environment, LatentView continued to grow across diversified markets and acquired its first international client during this time.
Although LatentView experienced some challenges related to the global pandemic, the company achieved growth with a significant market expansion in 2020-21, as a portion of its clients’ businesses rapidly accelerated their digital transformation. In November of 2021, LatentView created history as it became the highest subscribed Indian IPO. In 2022, in his role as Chairman, Venkat continues to play a strategic role in the growth and success of the organization.
Pramadh Jandhyala, Co-Founder, LatentView Analytics Ltd.
Pramad is an accomplished entrepreneur, speaker, and analytics thought-leader. At Latentview Analytics, Pramad focuses on building a strong platform for growth and is responsible for finance, talent management, strategic planning and CSR.
She has over two decades of experience working with corporate finance and credit teams in global firms such as IBM, Ford, Moody’s ICRA and Kotak Mahindra Bank. She has a diverse background, and has worked in consumer lending, corporate finance, project finance, capital markets and credit analysis.
Under Pramad’s strategic guidance and execution, LatentView Analytics created Indian Capital Markets history as the most subscribed IPO at over 338 times, collecting over 1.13 lakh crores.
In her spare time, Pramad nurtures an avid interest in digital photography and spends many hours with her Nikon capturing Chennai’s lively beaches and colourful temples. She graduated with a B.E. in Computer Science from BITS Pilani, and also has an MBA from IIM, Calcutta.
With what mission LatentView Analytics launched?
Vision: Inspire and transform businesses to excel in the digital world by harnessing the power of data and analytics.
Mission:
- Help clients win by creating holistic and sustainable impact powered by data.
- Become a talent magnet by empowering employees through a culture of fun, collaboration and learning.
- Drive excellence through thought leadership by ingraining innovation and insight into our DNA.
Purpose: For enterprises ready to solve complex business problems with data and move up the analytics maturity curve, LatentView is an established thought and execution leader in business intelligence (BI) consulting, data engineering, data analytics, and data science. Differentiated from traditional pure-play analytics companies or consultancies that focus either exclusively on analytics strategy or delivery, LatentView is an end-to-end analytics partner that provides bespoke analytics strategy, optimization, and implementation. LatentView has deep functional expertise across multiple industries and relationships with industry leaders in cloud, data visualization, data engineering, and customer data platforms.
USP of LatentView Analytics
We have a strong understanding of the digital-native space and the technology practice, which is also our largest practice. We deliver our services through a combination of mathematics, domain knowledge and technology understanding which make our solutions sustainable. Problem-solving is our core strength – our ability to understand the business and be a consulting partner to help guide businesses along the journey to the future is what drives our teams. We have strong & specific value propositions backed by strong assets and accelerators to deliver them.
Future Plans of the company
With the current trajectory that the industry is taking, especially from the point of view of post-COVID-19 recovery, we certainly see a big role for analytics and AI services to play in both predictive and pre-emptive ways across various industries and functions. To this effect, we have invested in creating multiple Centers of Excellence, one being in the Consulting Services space, through which we see ourselves play the role of an advisory partner over and above that of an implementation partner for several of our clients. Within our consulting practice, we have been able to create a number of unique value propositions with our strong industry and sub-sector understanding as well as our value chain understanding and functional expertise. We are strongly invested in an industry-aligned recruitment for our growth teams across sales, pre-sales, demand generation and marketing. To bolster our existing capability areas and develop new ones, we are taking a horizontal-focussed hiring approach, for example, in Graph ML and Image Analytics.
Value proposition “ConnectedView” helping the CPG Industry
On Shelf Availability of products is one of the most important north metrics for CPG companies. Availability in CPG is the Right Product for the Right Customer with the Right Quantity in the Right Place on the shelf (physical or digital) at the Right Time at the Right Price with the Right Quality. CPG companies have reported close to 25 percentage point drop in their On Shelf Availability & Service levels – which typically translates to a 6-7% loss in revenue.
As we at LatentView have tread deeper into the potential causes for this drop and gone beyond the external factors impacting modern supply chains, we have seen 2 Efficiency factors emerge : 1) Lack of Visibility, 2) Sub-optimal supply chain processes. The root cause for this is a Disconnected Supply Chain – a supply chain ecosystem where processes have standardized operations and technologies have integrated systems, but the intrinsic connections & inter-relationships between processes and their data points havent been clearly established. Therefore, supply chain personas at the decision making moment of truth are unable to take optimal decisions to drive improvements in On Shelf Availability. This is the very mission of ConnectedView.
ConnectedView is an On Shelf Availability improvement philosophy that enables supply chain personas with better and faster decisions through Connected Visibility to the supply chain and Connected Optimization of decisions delivered through a core ConnectedView framework, AI-powered accelerators, and LatentView’s analytics delivery capabilities.
Role of Data & Analytics, creating impacts in the Logistics & Supply Chain industry
It is an interesting paradox in the CPG industry today.
Data is ubiquitous and growing in volume and velocity at a breakneck speed. Everything from a picker’s mod and a truck driver’s tab to a drone’s flying path and an autonomous guided vehicle’s routing path is a data point. And this is being generated not by the month or the week, but by the minute and sometimes even more granular.
And on the other side, in our conversations with supply chain personas on ground, we learn that despite all that data, it takes 50% of their day to make sense of all that volume of data to arrive at the insight that can aid them in their decision making.
Data Analytics has a key role to play in simplifying the decision making journey for personas by detecting anomalies in the supply chain, finding the causal drivers, delivering actionable insights, and collecting feedback on action taken to continuously improve decisions.
Can you mention a few of the challenges in the Supply Chain industry and how it can be overcome with big data analytics?
The broad industry challenge is the 25 percentage point loss in On Shelf Availability that has resulted in a 6-7% loss of revenue opportunities for major CPG and Retail players. The 2 big drivers of this drop are:
Lack of Visibility – the sub challenges in this include that personas on ground are typically having to navigate 6-7 systems to arrive at decisions, most data points are Hindsights, not foresights; most systems don’t have the ability to identify and alert on risks
Sub Optimal processes – including Poor demand forecast accuracy, Long supply lead times, Poor suppli quality, Poor manufacturing throughout, Inefficient Logistics and last mile delivery operations.
With an AI-powered framework and solution like ConnectedView, organization’s can improve forecasting accuracy by bringing together internal as well as external data to understand drivers of demand, they can use modern AI/ML techniques and cloud technologies to predict manufacturing failures at scale, and they can drive improved visibility and orchestration of the supply chain by bringing together data from multiple systems and establishing connections.
How can data analytics be applied in supply chain management to improve operations and customer satisfaction?
The goal and ambition of analytics in supply chain has to be to drive better on shelf availability and customer service levels i.e. getting the 7 Rights of supply chain in place. That in itself is the road to improved customer service level and satisfaction.
