CEO Insights India

An alumnus of IIT Roorkee, Rajinder Singh, MD & Chief Mentor, Efeso Consulting has extensive experience working in manufacturing organizations in various roles with globally reputed companies like Ford Motor, Delphi Automotive Systems, and Voltas. These opportunities allowed him to travel across various countries and get involved with multiple organizations and meet diverse people. This is when he visualized a huge gap in the Indian manufacturing industry. He realized, that India despite having a highly skilled, talented, and powerful workforce, has never been able to create globally appreciated manufacturing organizations. Therefore in 2002, he decided to establish a company to help Indian organizations reach global positions and make a benchmark in the global markets. The company was founded to drive excellence in Indian Organizations with focus on improving manufacturing efficiency. This organization was later merged with Efeso Consulting to create the Indian arm of the global organization. Since then, under the leadership of Rajinder, Efeso has been successfully supporting global clients on their operational excellence journey and achieving exponential growth in the market. He has an exemplifying history of working in the management consulting industry and helping its leaders in implementing strategies to foster performance improvement & organizational growth. Let’s hear it from the leader who is helping organizations achieve outstanding business outcomes.

What has been the motivation behind your journey and what drives you today?
I was inspired by the thought of changing the scenario of manufacturing industries in India and creating a global manufacturing benchmarks in the country. With this intention, in 2002, my wife and I started ‘Q Spread’, which was to

help companies implement World class manufacturing practices. We drove ourselves out of interesting careers and the one motivation that helped us do that was our desire to create world class factories & develop excellence in workplaces. I have realized, that Indian shop floors are the most hated places as people here undergo a lot of pressure every day. Keeping that in mind, we started focusing our energies on fostering stability and a stress-free environment in factory shopfloors. I enjoy witnessing people improving their lives in factories, and warehouses, I count this as my driving force.

Tell us about the learnings and experiences that you acquired from IIT Roorkee.
IIT Roorkee had an excellent curriculum and gave opportunities to dive into the technical aspects of manufacturing goods. But apart from that, the most fascinating thing about IIT Roorkee was its cultural aspects and the human dynamics that ran around the campus which taught us to live, learn & grow with people coming from different backgrounds. Its extracurricular activities helped build personalities, which is more important than technical skills. I can fluently explain how things work in manufacturing industries because of my knowledge of technology which I acquired from IIT Roorkee. This experience makes everything more useful and applicable for me even today.

How would you define Efeso Consulting as an organization and its position in the market?
Efeso is one of the top five global companies which is purely focused on building operational excellence in organizations, throughout their value chain. With our association with 70 countries and 45 nationalities we have been able to accumulate abundant knowledge & experience and have documented those and made them available to every body to use in the organization. This creates a digital

back bone for the company. The uniqueness of Efeso is its humble and down-to-earth approach to helping companies implement great strategies.

What is your leadership approach?
I have reinforced significant leadership traits over a period of time by learning & gaining experiences from the people around me. Throughout my journey as a leader, I have constantly focused on practicing humility which gives me the power to be a good listener and learn from everyone, every day.

What are the major challenges that you have experienced in your journey so far and how did you overcome them?
When we started our company, the biggest challenge was to create trust in people. Indian consulting market was quite small and was dominated by Japanese consultants. People were not ready to give us work in India. But eventually, we went outside India and started consulting in Iran, Egypt and Dubai. Soon we became successful and received a lot of acceptance in India as people started to realize our capabilities as a consulting company. Another major challenge was retaining employees in the organization. To overcome that we created an environment where people loved to work with us and made sure they grabbed every opportunity to be successful. Even during the challenging times of the pandemic, when every other company was thinking to cut costs, we were thinking about expanding our knowledge. We spent a lot of time and expenses on training & coaching our employees and giving them opportunities to grow them selves.

Rajinder Singh, MD & Chief Mentor, Efeso Consulting
As Industrial Engineer from IIT-Roorkee, Rajinder is a certified facilitator of the Shingo Institute. He has three decades of expertise in lean manufacturing, enterprise transformation, TWI, and change management across the global automotive, F&B, textile, ceramics, chemical, and consumer durables industries.

•Favorite Cuisine: North Indian, Thai
•Favorite book: Goal by Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt
•Favourite Travel Destination: Germany, France, Amritsar
•Hobbies: Reading & photography