With an eye on improving the financial performance of the company, Mr Manu Parpia has initiated the first major organisational restructuring since taking charge as Chief Executive Officer of Godrej group company, Geometric, earlier this year.
The engineering services company, which has had three CEOs in five years, has consolidated its verticals, horizontals and corporate functions into eight broad buckets.
As a result, the total number of people reporting to the CEO has been reduced to eight from over 20.
“The good news is that the market is good. With a strong demand environment and a reasonably good team, we have a really good chance to overcome our problems though it requires a lot of effort,” Mr Parpia told
Mr Kalidasa Surapaneni, who was earlier the head of Geometric's industrial practice, is now also responsible for technical marketing and overseas geographies.
Mr Nitin Tappe (earlier responsible for software services) has been made the head of Global operations while Mr Venkatesh Jagannathan (earlier responsible for business development) will lead the strategy and innovation function.
Mr Shashank Patkar, CEO of 3DPLM, the company's joint venture with Dassault Systems, will directly report to Mr Parpia.
Looking for new CFO
The company is also on the look out for a new Chief Financial Officer. The previous CEO, Mr G. Ravishanker, was handling the finance function as well since 2008.
Interestingly, Mr Parpia was the CEO and Managing Director of the Geometric till 2006, before relinquishing it in favour of the former Tata Consultancy Services Vice-President, Mr Ravi Gopinath. Mr Gopinath was at the helm till February 2009, before making way for Mr Ravishankar
Geometric had posted a net profit growth of 50 per cent to Rs 17.84 crore in the fourth-quarter ended March 31, 2011, as against Rs 11.83 crore in the same quarter last year on a turnover of Rs 170 crore during the period
Though Geometric showed an improvement in performance last year, it has been lagging its peers for several years now. Geometric went through a troubled phase due to its relatively high exposure to the automobile industry in the US, which was bleeding during the economic recession.
Mr Parpia also feels that the company could have done a better job of making the global delivery centre or GDC model attractive to its clients.
Engineering services
“In the engineering services business, the movement of work from onsite to offshore did not happen as seamlessly as expected. The business is still dominated towards onsite, which is not very margin friendly,” said Mr Parpia.
He is confident that the new team would be able to reduce revenues from onsite operations from over 50 per cent currently by pushing clients to drive more work towards low cost countries such as India, China and Romania.