For any organization, staying current with emerging industry trends is not an easy task. As a result, there is a demand for the services of professionals known as business consultants, who have extensive knowledge and experience in their respective sectors and can provide businesses the boost they need to move forward and succeed.
A person with extensive academic and professional experience who offers their services to help business owners in their endeavors is known as a business consultant. These experts evaluate organizational objectives while identifying solutions to difficulties in the commercial world.
Featuring for The Enterprise World’s this issue of The best Business Consultants to Watch in 2023 is Synergeze Consultants Pvt Ltd., a business consultancy bringing about revolutionary business transformations.
In this interview with Mahendra S. Gupte, Sr. Vice President of Synergeze Consultants Pvt Ltd, we shall know more about the company’s growth and journey through the hurdles and challenges.
The Company-
Tell us about Synergeze Consultants Pvt Ltd.
Synergeze Consultants Pvt Ltd is an ITC-certified logistics and supply chain consultancy delivering pragmatic and innovative solutions in imports and exports (freight forwarding & customs clearance), multi-modal logistics, warehouse management and packaging (material and support). Its services cover the entire gamut of end-to-end supply chain.
The brand has a team of experienced professionals specializing in every aspect – strategy, improvement, outsourcing & recruitment, focusing on practical outcomes that add value, build revenues, and cost-cutting.
In just four and half years, Synergeze Consultants Pvt Ltd. has garnered success for its execution-based consulting, where it serves clients with a single-window approach that streamlines all their Supply Chain problems. Synergeze Consultants Pvt Ltd. also provides advisory roles to young entrepreneurs, showing the way to optimize resources, increase efficiency and operate seamlessly.
What were the initial challenges you faced?
To speak about the challenges, the biggest challenge for Synergeze Consultants was to create awareness among the industry to consider the Supply Chain as an enabler in the overall growth of the organization. And at the same time investing in people empowers them to perform beyond expectation because people are the real enablers for any process or strategy to deliver what is promised.
Creating and enhancing that awareness and making that realization worthwhile has remained and remains to be a major challenge.
Which was that point that triggered the growth of Synergeze Consultants?
As per what I have observed, it was COVID-19, which was a turning point for us. Yes, we all were affected, the business and there were suddenly no clients or no responses. With borders closing and imports being affected, the entire Supply Chain was in chaos. However, a big positive of COVID-19 was that all companies realized the importance of their Supply Chains and with an extremely dynamic market scenario, the companies started searching for ‘Real Players in SCM’, knowing the nitty-gritty of this business.
This is where we stepped up our visibility and started using social media to inform companies and MSMEs that we were available to take up their issues and provide them with feasible and long-term solutions. We all as a Team remained consistent and available to every inquiry that we received, even if it was somebody just wanting information on SCM. The joint efforts of the Team in meeting customers, over the Phone, with VCs, and talking to them brought back more inquiries.
What is the reason behind Synergeze Consultants’s long-standing success?
Many actions have set Synergeze Consultants on the road to success, the first of them is offering a COMBO of Process Re-Engineering and Behavioural transformation. This consulting cum training model is indigenously developed to ensure that the process and people in an organization are aligned together to deliver best of the results in accordance with the organizational goals.
Second is offering Execution based consulting. Synergeze Consultants manages entire EXIM operations for its clients and bridges the gap between them and the logistics service providers, taking care of both parties in terms of ensuring compliance from the manufacturers and assured service levels & customer focus from the service providers.
We also undertake Cost and Operations assessments of our clients in the domain of Logistics and end-to-end Supply Chain, identifying the opportunities for improvements in cost and process efficiency, and working closely with our clients on a roadmap to bridge the gap between the best industry benchmarks and the current modus operandi.
The Products/Services-
How do you decide to take Synergeze Consultants a step further in terms of your products/services?
Historically, logistics has been a fragmented, shifting industry heavily dependent upon materials demand and driven by GDP growth. But today, the era of competition is far gone; the new world, in our view, is all about collaboration and abundance. “The future is all about adding relevance to supply chain services and adapting quickly to the ever-changing demands.” To achieve this, “ We ensure that all of our services comply with the highest quality standards.”
The plan is to keep working with companies across the entire Supply Chain to navigate tougher challenges and to anticipate & develop pragmatic, winning strategies for tomorrow’s opportunities. Innovative ideas for our company come from our interaction with people across the globe and recently we have conceptualized the COMBO of Process Re-Engineering and behavioral transformation it is a unique offering for industries wherein process re-engineering and deployment are complemented with individual assessments and guidance at every hierarchy of the organization.
Leadership-
What are the key achievements of your entrepreneurial journey?
Where most entrepreneurial voyages pass through challenging lanes, my early-age habit of self-retrospection and evaluating myself, has stood me in good stead. During the pandemic, I have completed 20+ online learning courses which have helped me personally as well as helped us avoid many business pitfalls and progress toward Success.
My biggest takeaway has been that one needs to be self-sufficient in his own field and hence even today if I meet someone who is associated with a manufacturing or processing plant I try and fix a visit to learn and understand the technology, the processes, and the people working at the place. Another aspect extremely important in the entrepreneurial journey is building social capital, which is the need of the hour, especially after COVID-19, which has increased the importance of social media.
How do you look after your employees? What makes your team unique?
Synergeze Consultants’ work ethos revolves around Accountability with Responsibility guided by Continuous learning and Improvement, to equip ourselves and enable delivering beyond expectations. The most important trait we look for in our associates and stakeholders is their ability, zeal to learn, risk-taking ability, and acceptance of failures and bouncing back from them. We firmly believe that the Cost of doing nothing is far more than the cost of doing something wrong.
The mantra of motivation can be summarized in one line “You can’t be doing the same thing again and again and expect different results” So against obstacles and risks everyone has to be agile in one’s approach to action and reaction. Team enthusiasm comes from celebrating failures, learning from them, and taking necessary steps never to repeat the same mistakes/errors. While we take credit as a Team for Success, we also own up to our failures as a Team and have joint meetings to learn from the failures. This gives everybody an assurance of togetherness come what may and also a zeal to move forward and try even better next time.
