Mr. Deepak Patel, CEO, Aditya Birla Minacs	A+  A-

As the CEO, Deepak is responsible for the overall strategic direction, performance, and operational success of Aditya Birla Minacs.

Deepak has 20 years of experience in information technology, BPO, and consulting services. Most recently, he was the Managing Director and Group COO for MphasiS, an EDS company (now HP). During his time with MphasiS, Deepak transformed the company's commodity voice-based business to high-end, domain-rich, back office and transactional knowledge process outsourcing business with an international client base.

Throughout his career in the United States and India, Deepak has held a number of executive leadership positions in infrastructure outsourced operations, application services, consulting services, BPO/KPO, alliance management, and sales.

Deepak has a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the M.S. University of Baroda, is a graduate of the executive leadership program from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington, and has sat on a number of professional boards and associations throughout his career.

In addition to his professional responsibilities, Deepak is a prominent supporter of Junior Achievement India, an organization dedicated to providing education opportunities to underprivileged youth.

Excerpts from his conversation, where he discusses his organization’s vision, new acquisition and priorities.

Q: Aditya Birla Minacs is aiming to be among the top players of the industry. What are your growth strategies?
 
A: At Aditya Birla Minacs, our vision is to become a global business solutions company and to become a USD 1 billion company in the next three years. Our strategy to achieve growth is three-fold: firstly, grow organically by leveraging our existing customers and capabilities; second, leverage our Group companies to build new capabilities. And lastly, we will acquire the right assets that drive the enhancement of our solutions portfolio and demonstrate our capabilities. The focus of this strategy is to grow our wallet share with existing clients and also to win new clients by working in their core processes.

Q: You have recently acquired Compass BPO. What are the new services or solutions that you have added to your portfolio and the ones that you are planning to add?

A: Compass BPO provides services in the area of finance and accounting (FAO) in the UK, the US, UAE and India. The acquisition gives us a firm foothold in the FAO segment and enables us to venture into newer industry sectors like foods & beverages and US government business. The FAO services would be largely delivered out of our centres in Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai.  We continue to remain interested in adding Healthcare, Insurance and Banking & Financial Services related capabilities to our portfolio.

Q: Which are your focus industries and markets? Do you plan to expand in the domestic market as well?

A: Our focus industries include BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), TIME (telecom, technology infrastructure, media, and entertainment), Manufacturing and the public sector Industry groups.  
The industry-wise revenue break-up is:

• Manufacturing – 50%,
• High Tech –19%,
• Banking and Financial Services – 16%,
• Telecom – 11%,
• Insurance – 1%, Others – 3%.

We operate across 3 continents with 29 centers spanning Canada, Germany, Hungary, India, Philippines, the UK and USA. More recently we have inked an alliance with Capitalianz in the Kingdom of Bahrain, thereby expanding our reach to include the Bahrain and Kuwait markets in the Middle East.

We entered the domestic market over a year back and have six clients, out of which the Idea Cellular deal is the biggest. We provide support in Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, Khasi and Assamese apart from Hindi and English to 35 million Idea customers.  Minacs’ focus is on delivering operational efficiency and speed of delivery to the different levels of local complexity in the domestic market. We have centres in Chennai, Aurangabad and have recently opened our second centre in Vadodara.

As part of our strategy to be a USD 1-billion company in the next three years, we are eyeing the fast-growing telecom and BFSI space in the domestic market.

Q: Share with us three things that you as a CEO have brought to Aditya Birla Minacs?

A: The basics - Strong operating disciplines; an attitude of “doing what we say we are going to do” on a consistent basis; creating an environment where teams can take calculated risks; and finally relentless focus on our customer and their customers with a passion to exceed expectations through excellence and speed of execution.

Q: Shed light on the Aditya Birla Minacs ‘Connect India: Hub and Spoke’ business model in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. How is Aditya Birla Minacs doing things differently?

A: The Indian economy continues to develop with large number of users both in urban and rural areas interacting in many local languages.

We have pioneered an innovative proactive response to this evolving business scenario that is reliable and cost effective; Connect India. Connect India model comprises of hubs in tier 1 and 2 cities, connected to smaller centers as ‘spokes’ in neighboring tier 3 and 4 towns, to form a mesh for decentralized but integrated BPO service delivery integrating Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Planning (BCP).

We have already set up four centres in Chennai, Baroda, Aurangabad, and Kolkata that act as hubs for their respective regions and now are in the process of rolling our ‘spokes’ that connect to these hubs. We also look for the opportunity to set up a hub in the NCR region.

Q: What are your priorities for Aditya Birla Minacs given the recuperating economy?

A: We believe that Companies at large will more and more focus on their “core competencies” and look to variabilize their cost structures by outsourcing the rest; thus making them more nimble, flexible and able to efficiently react to market dynamics while improving their profitability and return on capital deployed.  This represents a massive opportunity for the BPO Industry as the depth and breadth of services being outsourced continue to expand.

The key priority for Aditya Birla Minacs is to continue to expand its portfolio of services in the core value chain of our customer’s industries by a) partnering with our clients and prospects; b) working our Aditya Birla Group Companies to develop these capabilities and c) acquiring targeted capabilities through inorganic means.

Updated on: 30 Jun, 2010