Praveen Upadhyay

Bringing with him an experience of over three decades, Upadhyay has been successfully implementing efficient strategies for several companies that he’s been working with through his career. Elaborating on some of the best strategies adopted by him and his team for Virtusa, he states that “In the domain of value engineering we have successfully contributed towards bringing down the Cost Per Seat (CPS) from $200 to $80 through various process improvements at Virtusa Hyderabad and in the meantime increased the seating capacity from 96 sq-ft to 80 sq-ft per seat through retrofit projects. In order to consume from sustainable sources of energy we installed a solar plant of 50KW at the Hyderabad campus that now provides for 2% of the overall energy consumption.”

Commenting on the challenges prevalent in the industry, he says that “The system of BIM (Building Information Modelling) is currently not being followed stringently for several infrastructure projects.” He further states that lack of structured FM courses are resulting scarcity of skilled manpower in FM fraternity, especially in technical side. There is also a need for defined vendor management protocol to fight monopoly in the market due to scarce resources.  “Compliance management is another challenge, especially labor compliance. The documentation process varies from consultants to consultant. No clarity on exemptions to IT & ITES companies and paper work has become a nuisance in today’s technology days, explains Upadhyay.