Business success is a professional journey focused on evolving your processes in response to current market needs, which change with the changing dynamics of demand-supply equilibrium. Too immersed in your daily routine, you may frequently wonder why your own perspective is insufficient to find a solution to the most important business problem—whether to adopt some necessary yet radical technologies in your core organizational functioning.

This is when Thoucentric‘s expert holistic perspective can make all the difference by becoming your thought partner and resolving all your business issues through constant progressive consultation.

A niche consulting firm founded by Neelakshi Kotnis and Archi Bagchi, Thoucentric uses relevant digital and functional domain expertise to solve problems in Supply Chain, Sales and Distribution, and Finance.

Neelakshi shares that at Thoucentric, they do not just provide advisory solutions. “Our services identify, define, develop, and implement strategies that push companies toward growth.” They focus on practical and innovative solutions coupled with expert operations delivery to maximize growth.

“We understand market needs as well as anticipate clients’ wants, needs, and pain points, thereby creating business strategies and the best possible solutions to meet our client’s every requirement,” she says, adding, “As an organization, we also believe in…

Learning by Doing”

From the very start, they’ve strongly adhered to the policy of unburdening their consultants from all kinds of administrative pressure. “We want our team to work out of self-motivation instead of just work obligations. It is in this ideology that our flat hierarchical structure found its genesis.”

They encourage their entire team to step out of their comfort zone by learning under pressure, with their dynamic environment allowing numerous possibilities and a more holistic approach to broaden their knowledge and perfect new skills.

In essence, this culture helps give their people a positive and empowering experience that motivates them to work better in any field. “We believe that customer centricity is, to a large extent, influenced by employee centricity, and we’ve strived to achieve just that over the years.”

According to Neelakshi, in a world where competition regularly claims to be #1, Thoucentric’s consulting framework stands out by integrating subject matter expertise, technological understanding, structured project management, and governance. Talking more about their initial challenges, Neelakshi expresses, “As a small fish in a big ocean, we had to compete with some of the largest fish from the get-go. With a wealth of knowledge and diverse hands-on expertise from our senior partners who have worked in similar environments, we act naturally as extensions of our client’s teams.” Moreover, having worked in similar environments to those of our clients, we understand the clients better than anyone else,” she adds.

Amid evolving needs and frequent use of more novel business approaches, they are continuously reinventing themselves by adopting emerging technologies and introducing new processes, solutions, and products. By committing to active partnerships with the best in the business, they stay aware of the evolving technology landscape.

Their collaborations with their technology partners help them develop strategies, and their consultants work on end-to-end projects incorporating these world-class technologies. “In the process, we have built…

A State-of-the-Art Digital Workforce

…of data scientists, engineers, and visualization experts, which helps us create solutions for clients who want to develop point solutions themselves,” she says.

At Thoucentric, Neelakshi is currently looking after sales and people initiatives of the organization.

Under her pragmatically astute leadership, Thoucentric has grown from humble beginnings with a vision of creating a place that could bridge the gap between business and technology while balancing quality and growth to drive business transformations. Starting as a tight-knit community of experienced consultants, Thoucentric began its journey in 2015 by stepping into supply chain consulting and program management. “Having started small, we later ventured into new functional areas like Finance and Sales,” she reflects.

In a short journey of seven years, Neelakshi and her team became a trusted problem solver for clients backed by the

Thoucentric ‘Ethos’

and their deep domain expertise has helped them achieve over 50 partnerships. At this point, she was instrumental in setting up their unique introspection-based framework at Thoucentric called NEON that helps employees self-evaluate themselves to plan, create their own goals, and track their progress.

Furthermore, Thoucentric launched proprietary platforms focusing on emerging tech (AI/ML/IoT), and with this, they helped clients take better decisions with a unique set of skills and solutions. “As we expand to reach greater heights across markets, industries, and functions we are constantly evolving to become an ideal environment for both employees and clients alike,” states Neelakshi.

Their team provides you with data-rich facts describing your state and converting aspirations into measurable outcomes. “We implement initiatives that are strategic, integrated, and embedded across the organization as a whole.” Each of their initiatives is tailored to the specific needs of their clients, taking into account the unique character of their organization and the context in which they operate. “To ensure accountability and propagate change throughout the organization, we guide both individuals and teams to make sure their voices are heard.”

With a wide variety of offerings under its belt, Thoucentric helps enable its clients to build processes and solutions that fully reflect the diversity in the world and community they serve.

Innovation-Centric Tech Consultation

An outstanding woman entrepreneur, Neelakshi was awarded the Woman MSE Achiever in 2019 by Economic Times and SIDBI for her excellent record in establishing and leading a successful business.

Being an experienced leader, sharing her opinion on how the adoption of modern technologies is impacting the consulting space and how Thoucentric is adapting to the change, Neelakshi conveys, “Thanks to technology existing as an essential part of our modern world, technology consulting needs to constantly adapt to the latest trends.” And today, consulting means a lot more. It can play a huge role in the strategy and processes of a company. She states that their services help clients by developing and implementing technological solutions to accelerate business growth, manage risk better, reduce costs, and change how the system is functioning.

“Our goal is to inform clients of how to use their practices to achieve business objectives by providing them with the right tools and technologies to do so.”

That’s where the Thoucentric consultant steps in. From helping find the best way to collect and analyze data to managing end-to-end processes, its unique and fresh approaches with modernized solutions help the team identify all details about the problem domain. In the end, technology consulting is focused on innovation, and Thoucentric helps clients by bringing new, helpful solutions that fix any business problems.

Their larger, more resource-rich, and more established competitors had and still have a major advantage in terms of visibility in the market. So, their initial challenge was gaining clients who did not know them in an industry that was densely populated by some very big players. “What helped us during the early stages was that we were attempting—and were largely successful in—assembling a team capable of gaining access to some of the industry’s most powerful clients,” she divulges.

Another problem that this team helped them solve in the initial days was that of short-term sustainability. She informs, “We did not seek funding from big private equity firms and venture capitalists, as is the trend of the day. Instead, we focused on getting paid from day one on the strength of an experienced team with a track record of success.”

Currently, the biggest challenge that they have put their minds to is scaling up from this strong foundation that they have built over the last seven years. To do this, they need people who have similar values to theirs and whom they can mould into…

Fantastic Consultants of the Future

Other than that, Neelakshi believes that more challenges always await them in these changing global and domestic macro environments that their clients operate in, which keeps them on their toes all the time.

As a piece of advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the consulting space, Neelakshi says that the consulting industry, by nature, relies a lot on a problem-solving approach. Every client has their own set of problems with unique constraints attached to them. “The best advice I can give to those seeking to enter this domain is to thoroughly understand your clients, and half your work is done.” The other half, and the tougher half, is to find the perfect consultant who would be the best for solving that particular client’s problems. “In my experience, the latter can be achieved by building a team that has complementary skills, and as a leader, you should be able to respect the diverse skills and opinions that everyone brings to the table. That has greatly helped us in our journey.”

Today, it is a consumer economy, with large conglomerates capturing most of the market share and having the resources and capability to outbid a smaller consulting firm like ours. “However, that’s where our value proposition for niche offerings takes centre stage. We focus on niche areas of consulting that are often overlooked by large MNCs. My one piece of advice to budding entrepreneurs would be that if you look closely enough, you will find gaps that have been left by others, and with enough conviction, you will be able to come up with innovative ways to provide value to clients by filling those gaps.”

When probed about how she envisions scaling Thoucentric’s operations and offerings in the future, Neelakshi reveals that the world order has never been so dynamic with technologies disrupting traditional ways of doing business and adding to it the complexity of a global pandemic then consulting as an industry becomes all the more relevant today. “Digitization has been a big part of our work for the past couple of years and we expect to grow and scale in this area even in the future. We have also scaled up geographically in the recent past, to capture more markets and aim to continue the same in the near future.”

Other than that, recruiting new talent is a very critical aspect for all consulting companies, and they have tried their best to break down barriers to find the best talent that fits their long-term vision. “Being a people-centric company, we believe catering to our employees along with the clientele goes a long way in ensuring sustainable growth and scaling up,” she concludes.