N. S. Bala

Biography

 N. S. Bala is the President, Manufacturing & Technology. Bala manages the P&L for this division that contributes to over 19% of the global revenues of Wipro Technologies. The 8000 people strong division focuses on enabling organizations in the Manufacturing industry transform their business in an ever changing economic environment by using IT as a lever to make them more agile and responsive across the entire value chain – areas such as customer management, manufacturing, supply chain, product engineering etc. Over the years, Bala has restructured the business unit to deepen its focus on specific sub-industry segments, building a strong customer advisory capability and offering integrated services across business process, applications and infrastructure. He has also been instrumental in driving innovation in delivery through models such as the Factory Model and Center for Integrated Global Management of Applications (Cigma). During his stint at Wipro, Bala has been through the transformation experienced in the Indian IT industry and has also been a key contributor to Wipro’s journey in becoming one of the prominent players among the global service providers. Bala has been instrumental in pioneering the use of Toyota Production Systems principles in application & software development that was developed into a case study by the Harvard Business School and is being taught at the institute to MBAs. He was invited by Harvard to speak on the case study. The delivery model has also been featured in the book, Bangalore Tiger by Steve Hamm. His recent innovation, Cigma, won Wipro the NASSCOM Innovation Award. Bala has been a speaker at Supply Chain conferences, Outsourcing conferences and other forums such as SAPPHIRE, Oracle Open World during his years in the industry. He holds a MBA degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, one of the premier management institutes in India.

Research Interest

  Manufacturing industry