NE BUISNESS BUREAU
COIMBATORE, APRIL 21
Pumps and Water Technologies major EKKI on Thursday announced the appointment of Dr. Sujit Banerji, Emeritus Professor, WMG, University of Warwick, UK as chief advisor.
Dr. Sujit Banerji will hold responsibility for strategy at the group level. In addition, Dr Banerji will lend his expertise in globalization and operations management, across the group. The Warwick professor, who has been commended as ‘a leading advisor and thought leader’ will help EKKI and the group management to design and execute an appropriate strategy.
Dr Banerji a close friend and confidant of Late Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, Chairman of Warwick Manufacturing Group moved to the University of Warwick upon his request. Dr Banerji studied at IIT, Kharagpur for the BTech degree in Mechanical Engineering and MTech degree in Industrial Engineering. He then did his PhD in Operations Research at the University of Manchester and Cambridge University. He has also taught at the Singapore Management University. He is a US citizen.
Prior to The University of Warwick, he spent more than 30 years with IBM. With the boom in the economy of the Asia-Pacific region he spent the latter years spearheading IBM’s Strategic Outsourcing business, first as CIO and Vice-President of IBM (India), and then at the company’s ASEAN headquarters in Singapore.
While with IBM, along with publishing 80 major internal papers, he won numerous lifetime achievement awards for his work. He switched to full-time academia in late 2004 when he retired from IBM. Dr Banerji has worked with many Fortune 500 companies in several different countries and has served on several boards of top companies.
Commenting on this appointment, Kanishka Arumugam, CEO of EKKI said, “Water is still one of the least technologically influenced industries on the planet. This provides big opportunities for EKKI. For more than 5 decades Professor Sujit Banerji has been at the heart of business and a powerful advocate of manufacturing. His wisdom, passion, and advocacy of the importance of globally competitive manufacturing, technology, research teaching, and training has helped guide national and international leaders, business figures and policy makers.
We are very fortunate to associate with Prof Banerji, who will play an important role in guiding us in our future growth. EKKI is making a strategic transition to become a Sustainable Water Technology Company and we are currently focused on creating multiple platforms that will accelerate our growth and create significant societal value through digitalization, servitization and being a system solutions provider for the water industry.”
