CEO Insights Magazine

Today, age-old methods of expansion and innovation are not sustainable for B2B businesses. Growth in today’s market requires a long-term, feasible vision that serves as the strong base for a company-wide strategy. To successfully achieve these broad goals, organizations need to execute decisions quickly and effectively. In particular, larger organizations need to adapt to the changing business climate. For C-level executives, it can be challenging to manage and monitor an entire business while dedicating the time necessary to this forward vision. They require a trusted hand to help define growth goals and oversee execution. The chief growth officer fulfils this role.

Thirugnanam, a multi-talented CGO is making great strides to help DESICREW Solutions reach new heights. He has a specialization in Data Science, Data Analysis, and Machine learning, to name a few. Since its inception in 2007, DESICREW has been at the forefront of creating jobs in the villages, tier two and three towns of India. In this interview with CEO Insights Asia, Thirugnanam, ‘Thiru’ to his team, shares his insights on his career journey, interests, and his future goals.

Could you tell us about your role at DESICREW Solutions?

I’ve always wanted to pursue a career that has a Social Impact. To me, DESICREW offered that platform. DESICREW’s core idea is to create a positive impact in rural areas by tapping untapped talents. We are working towards taking jobs from cities to tier-four geographies.

As the Chief Growth Officer at DESICREW, my role is to drive the organization as the preferred Human-inthe- loop (HITL) Solution provider for AI initiatives. It is my role to constantly evolve the organization to make ourselves relevant to client requirements. This involves understanding clients’ operations, and business plans and building capacity internally to handle their processes. I also have to ensure our IT Infrastructure is state-of-art to manage client expectations.

What were some of the challenges that you faced when working to expand your company to tier-three cities?

The main challenge was, there were many questions unanswered. For instance, do these locations have a strong digital infrastructure? What about the availability of talent? and language capabilities? To name a few.

Thanks to one of our first clients, a leading Insurance Company, we got to address these questions with our performance. Soon, our customer portfolio expanded. We created job opportunities for people in the tier-two and tier-three towns of India. trained people, picked candidates with leadership qualities, and groomed them to become managers. Female employees tend to stay longer with the company, which leads to low attrition rates. Also, they grew in their roles and functions to handle higher responsibilities.

Our delivery centres are well equipped with workstations, an internet connection, and a backup power generator with an uninterruptible power supply to ensure that work goes on without any hitches. Currently, DESICREW employs over 1600 people from our delivery centres in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, with over 70 percent of them being Women. DESICREW’s Business Model is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.

With the advent of Automation, AI, and RPA, several outsourcing jobs were becoming redundant. We had to reskill our employees to make them relevant to the contemporary requirements of clients. We shifted our focus to the AI industry and explored how our workforce could contribute to clients in their AI pursuits. Accordingly, we developed DTOUCH to create learning modules to provide continuous training to our teams. We believe our journey involves continuous evolution and alignment with client requirements.

Can you shed light upon DESICREW Solutions?

Incubated out of IIT-Madras, DESICREW’s journey began in 2007, with the intent of creating IT-based jobs  in rural areas. We create IT-based career opportunities for educated youngsters who, for socioeconomic reasons, particularly women, are unable to move to big cities. Through DESICREW, they can be gainfully employed without having to migrate to big cities. For clients, they get access to trained resources providing quality services, without them having to worry about resource management and attrition.

At DESICREW we ensure the seamless delivery of high-quality business process solutions for our clients in the areas of AI, Machine Learning, and Analytics. We also have separate business units offering F&A and Software Testing services. We are an award-winning Impact sourcing organization. Our company’s mission is to create a business model that will connect the three dots: Technology, Business, and Social Impact. DESICREW’s model works towards creating employment, eradicating poverty, and encouraging Gender Equality and Women Empowerment.

What are some of the technologies you have adopted to achieve your mission?

DESICREW's mission is to create job opportunities in our locations by integrating People, Processes, and Technology. It is imperative that we embrace emerging technologies for this purpose. To address the fastevolving business demands in a complex data-oriented environment, today's ITOps team cannot continue to rely on the old-style monitoring and automation approaches. With the A1Ops platform coupled with Specialist Engineers, the ITOps can leverage the capabilities that enable better service delivery, increased efficiency, and reduced costs. Traditional IT Operations tools are not adequate for the growing scope of the modern IT environment. AlOps platform and Intelligent BOTS are purpose-built for modern IT to optimize the cost of IT Operations. DESICREW has built capacities and is offering services in the areas of Managed ITOps driven by Al Ops, DevOps, and SecOps.

Thirugnanam Shanmugavelu, Chief Growth Officer, DESICREW Solutions

Thiru is an alumnus of the Thiagarajar College of Engineering 1990 batch. He completed his post-graduation in ME-Communication Systems at Anna University. He was an entrepreneur who also wore an Academician’s hat, before joining DESICREW in 2007. At DESICREW he heads Operations and IT.

Thiru is responsible for building DESICREW’s rural delivery centres from ground zero to ISOcertified centres. He was instrumental in setting up the DESICREW Centre of Artificial Intelligence at Kollumangudi, Tamil Nadu in 2022. Recently, he has introduced the use of Solar Energy to power the centres as a part of DESICREW’s Go Green Initiative. He also conducts classes on Automation and AI modules in the D-Touch Program. In 2019, he completed a certified course on Data Science and Big Data Analytics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.