For Paavan Choudary, founder and CEO of Merilytics, an analytics firm based in Hyderabad, decision science is a quotidian task.
While Decision Science is defined as “a collaborative approach involving mathematical formulae, business tactics, technological applications and behavioral sciences to help senior management make data-driven decisions”, for Choudary, it is much more than that.
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“Decision Science is more than number crunching, it’s an art,” says Choudary.
While speaking with AIM, Choudary spoke about Merilytics’ future plans, strategy and the company’s approach to clients’ issues.
Decision Science Is Art
Explaining Merilytics’ unique decision science-based approach to problems, Choudary said, “It is the need of the day. Decision science-based outlook towards our clients’ problems helps draw rational, fact-based conclusions. We help our clients analyse their ever-changing data, draw meaningful answers and making decisions that have long-lasting impact. Along with using dynamic Analytics, it is also exciting to adopt newer technologies to change and redesign the way things operate. But it’s always a challenge to be able to drive that through all levels of the organisation.”
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With a strong domain knowledge across the value chain spanning sales, marketing, finance, operations and risk management Merilytics’ efficient interactive, flexible model augments their response time.
Choudary added that that the current technology was merely scratching the surface of the innumerable possibilities in the field.
“Our analytical tools enable automated data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) in a highly secure environment. In addition, we employ various machine learning algorithms and advanced analytical techniques to find intrinsic patterns in data, and overlay those patterns with our domain expertise to generate valuable insights,” he added.
The Indian Market
Discussing the Indian market and the nascent stage of the Analytics industry, Choudary said, “It is definitely the next big thing in the country, in fact, it already is.”
He also said that the IT industry had sort of smoothed the way for Analytics in India. “From ’90s onward the big players in the IT sectors have been working in a similar area. In fact, we still fall under the ITES (Information Technology Enabled Services) sector.”
Future Plans
Founded in 2011, Merilytics has an employee base of about 200 as of now. But things are moving ahead, as Choudary informed us that they had recently opened offices in the New York City in the US.
“We are also looking at expanding to Europe. The on-shore/off-shore model has been greatly beneficial to us,” Choudary added.
The Beginning
Choudary started his career at Capital One Financial Services in Richmond, Virginia where he spent five years streamlining the credit card operations across customer services, risk management and fraud divisions. He was subsequently a part of building the company’s mortgage lending division.
He later worked for McKinsey & Company with clients from across the US, Africa and India where he advised C-level executives across sectors such as banking, private equity, healthcare, non-profit sector, shipping, agriculture and power among others. Choudary is also well-versed in a wide range of sectors related to technology, operations, finance, marketing, strategy and human resources. Choudary has an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai and an MBA from Columbia Business School, New York.
Merilytics’ core team consists of Choudary, COO Dharmendra Sunkara, and VP (technology operations) Jaykumar Bidarkar.
Choudary, along with Pankaj Rai, senior vice president of strategy at Wells Fargo, Subramanian MS, head of analytics at BigBasket.com, and Iqbal Kaur, co-founder of Zylotech will be participating in the panel discussion “Analytics — balancing ‘advanced’ and ‘actionable’,” during the Cypher event to be held from September 21-23.
