Poorna Pradeep Lankipalli: A Passionate Business Leader Streamlining & Strengthening The Tiles & Sanitary Ware Industry
Poorna Pradeep Lankipalli
CEO & MD
Let’s get to develop an indepth idea about Poorna Pradeep's IT and entrepreneurial stint as a professional and a leader through the exclusive interaction between him and the CEO Insights magazine.
Give a brief account of your professional journey.
I'm a B.Tech graduate (2004), and my career kickstarted as a Software Engineer in the IT sector. Working in the software industry for almost 13 remarkable years, internationally (India- Bangalore, Hyderabad, & Mumbai, and the US, China, and Europe), I've served mostly US-based product companies, and have been also part of multiple startups, like Target and Linkedin. While I was there with Linkedin(US) for almost five years in the Senior Big Data Analyst role, developing systems that are driven based on Business Intelligence, I then served the startup Groupon EMEA as the SEO & Affiliates Big Data Analytics lead. It was in 2017 that I joined our family-owned business; moving back to India from Dublin to take over my retiring father in law’s incepted business - Siddhartha Tiles & Sanitary, as per his accord.
Describe your leadership approach.
Being an engineering graduate, I do everything in a structured way, and Mathematics makes more sense to me than Science, as it is all about numbers when it comes to business. I also always believe in data driven decisions, rather than intuitions. That’s what I’ve learned in my professional career and have implemented it in my current business.
Well for me, leadership is all about adaptability. I changed from a professional environment (white collar job) to a non-professional(blue collared family business), and then again to a professional one being appointed as the CEO & MD of the company. Now, we are running the business in a very smooth and professional way led by my leadership skills, adaptable nature, data-driven decision-making skills, and technology implementation.
Define Siddhartha Tiles & Sanitary as an organization and its position in the Building Materials segment.
Aging 30 years, Siddhartha Tiles and Sanitary is a sentiment than a mere company. The employees at the company are with us for over 25 years now, and we work here treating each other as family.
In terms of positioning, I can proudly say that we are the number one building material supply company in the entire AP, AP & Telangana, and even in South India, or PAN India. For example, we are the major supplier and number one dealer of Johnson Tiles and we have been a market leader for last almost seven years now. In the same way for the national brand Jaquar, we've been positioned as number one in AP for the last four years, number two in AP & Telangana, number four in South India, and number eight in PAN-India. It’s similar for brands like Kohler and Parryware too.
What are the factors you look into when developing effective corporate growth strategies?
I always look at the business from the customer’s perspective, and this lets me look for things that a customer would strive for when buying a product. Getting in the customer’s shoes, the things that come to my mind are aesthetics, customer-friendly treatment, customer satisfaction, and most importantly, the price. Being on the management side, I take care of all these factors in a very careful manner, so that we are at par with the market competition. I also ensure that the customers have a good experience when they visit our showrooms.
How do you ensure maintenance of quality at each of providing your products to the customers?
Well, we majorly deal with all branded products like Jaquar, Kohler, Parryware, Johnson, and Santil. While these all are national brands with specific ISO standard certifications, quality checks, and proper customer support facilities entrenched, their good brand value speaks for them, and we believe, in our supplier’s quality of products & service.
And, when it comes to our in house brand SANTIL, we let our quality measures be set by relaying our production measures to our OEM partners and adhering to all the regulations like ISO 9001:2001 standards and more in the process. Our Tiles’ product quality is defined by the surface, color mismatch, shade variations, pinholes, or the curvature of the tile. For any complaints (rare), we provide 100 percent replacement, including the labor charge. Selling almost, 50000- 80,000 boxes a month, our operations imply Six-Sigma quality measures.
What are the ways you have been deploying technology to enhance your operations and processes?
We have a robust ERP system that has the Tally customized to our own requirements to manage the business. At the same time, I have also built a business intelligence system where I store the entire data collected from Tally and from the different market sources. I generate a lot of analytics, and do a lot of data science to optimize my decisions in terms of product buying, selling & price-determining, RoI, the challenges forth, cost optimization, and investment plan to improve the business in the marketing sense, or the employee satisfaction, and more. All these data driven decisions are being done in a different system,
We want to make SANTIL a national brand across all the products with which we are dealing & at the same time maintain customer satisfaction
What are the factors you look into when developing effective corporate growth strategies?
I always look at the business from the customer’s perspective, and this lets me look for things that a customer would strive for when buying a product. Getting in the customer’s shoes, the things that come to my mind are aesthetics, customer-friendly treatment, customer satisfaction, and most importantly, the price. Being on the management side, I take care of all these factors in a very careful manner, so that we are at par with the market competition. I also ensure that the customers have a good experience when they visit our showrooms.
How do you ensure maintenance of quality at each of providing your products to the customers?
Well, we majorly deal with all branded products like Jaquar, Kohler, Parryware, Johnson, and Santil. While these all are national brands with specific ISO standard certifications, quality checks, and proper customer support facilities entrenched, their good brand value speaks for them, and we believe, in our supplier’s quality of products & service.
And, when it comes to our in house brand SANTIL, we let our quality measures be set by relaying our production measures to our OEM partners and adhering to all the regulations like ISO 9001:2001 standards and more in the process. Our Tiles’ product quality is defined by the surface, color mismatch, shade variations, pinholes, or the curvature of the tile. For any complaints (rare), we provide 100 percent replacement, including the labor charge. Selling almost, 50000- 80,000 boxes a month, our operations imply Six-Sigma quality measures.
What are the ways you have been deploying technology to enhance your operations and processes?
We have a robust ERP system that has the Tally customized to our own requirements to manage the business. At the same time, I have also built a business intelligence system where I store the entire data collected from Tally and from the different market sources. I generate a lot of analytics, and do a lot of data science to optimize my decisions in terms of product buying, selling & price-determining, RoI, the challenges forth, cost optimization, and investment plan to improve the business in the marketing sense, or the employee satisfaction, and more. All these data driven decisions are being done in a different system,
developed by me, where as the day-to-day operations are being run in Tally.
Compared to earlier, with the right and robust systems in place, our operations have become fast and we have a lot more time to spend with the customer and enhance our business.
Are there new ideas that you are working on currently? Could you tell us a brief detail about it?
We are currently working on a CRM (not the typical CRM). At present, we have nice and good-looking showrooms where customers can come and spend some time selecting and finalizing which product to buy. Currently, we are doing more of a reaction to sales but through our CRM strategy what I strive to do is get into proactive business, reach out to the customers who have the requirement, and then give them multiple options to choose from (pricing & products) through a presentation (plug and play) in a nice and aesthetic manner, within their budget.
How do you perceive the future changes in the market and what would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs in the field?
Today, there's a huge amount of market opportunity in terms of building products, especially in the present era. Previewing the market trend 8-10 years back, there weren’t so many designs in the tiles and sanitary ware segment. The tiles and sanitary ware have become more of a luxury & fashion product to customers, nowadays. With a wide array of product ranges to choose from, perceiving the expansive customer preference, where it is good for customers, it is contrarily hard for the showrooms to maintain and display the large assortment of products. Subsequently, the industry will move more towards display aesthetics and fast-moving inventory rather than maintaining inventory. Hence, industry leaders need to have to think optimally.
Delineate your future plans.
As we have started our own brand called SANTIL, a couple of years back, and till late we never faced any complaints or quality issues with our brand because of its high standards, we want to make this brand a national brand across all the products with which we are dealing and at the same time maintain customer satisfaction.
Also, Siddhartha Tiles and Sanitary being there in the industry for the last 30 years now, has become a very familiar and common brand name in the towns we operate. So, in the future, making use of our brand credibility we want to spread our wings into multiple streams of businesses like construction and, contracts or holidays business and establish ourselves as a Group of Companies. This expansion will not only let us improve customer satisfaction levels but our brand presence as well.
Poorna Pradeep Lankipalli, CEO & MD
A B.Tech graduate, Poorna Pradeep, holds around 13 years of experience working in the IT sector product based field globally. With skills in Data Science and Business Intelligence, he has held leadership roles like Project Leader BI (Target), Senior Big Data Analyst(Linkedin),SEO & Affiliates Big Data (Group on EMEA). As an efficient professional and leader, he is currently overhauling the Indian Tiles & Sanitary ware space leveraging his magnanimous leadership and business acumen.
Compared to earlier, with the right and robust systems in place, our operations have become fast and we have a lot more time to spend with the customer and enhance our business.
Are there new ideas that you are working on currently? Could you tell us a brief detail about it?
We are currently working on a CRM (not the typical CRM). At present, we have nice and good-looking showrooms where customers can come and spend some time selecting and finalizing which product to buy. Currently, we are doing more of a reaction to sales but through our CRM strategy what I strive to do is get into proactive business, reach out to the customers who have the requirement, and then give them multiple options to choose from (pricing & products) through a presentation (plug and play) in a nice and aesthetic manner, within their budget.
How do you perceive the future changes in the market and what would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs in the field?
Today, there's a huge amount of market opportunity in terms of building products, especially in the present era. Previewing the market trend 8-10 years back, there weren’t so many designs in the tiles and sanitary ware segment. The tiles and sanitary ware have become more of a luxury & fashion product to customers, nowadays. With a wide array of product ranges to choose from, perceiving the expansive customer preference, where it is good for customers, it is contrarily hard for the showrooms to maintain and display the large assortment of products. Subsequently, the industry will move more towards display aesthetics and fast-moving inventory rather than maintaining inventory. Hence, industry leaders need to have to think optimally.
Delineate your future plans.
As we have started our own brand called SANTIL, a couple of years back, and till late we never faced any complaints or quality issues with our brand because of its high standards, we want to make this brand a national brand across all the products with which we are dealing and at the same time maintain customer satisfaction.
Also, Siddhartha Tiles and Sanitary being there in the industry for the last 30 years now, has become a very familiar and common brand name in the towns we operate. So, in the future, making use of our brand credibility we want to spread our wings into multiple streams of businesses like construction and, contracts or holidays business and establish ourselves as a Group of Companies. This expansion will not only let us improve customer satisfaction levels but our brand presence as well.
Poorna Pradeep Lankipalli, CEO & MD
A B.Tech graduate, Poorna Pradeep, holds around 13 years of experience working in the IT sector product based field globally. With skills in Data Science and Business Intelligence, he has held leadership roles like Project Leader BI (Target), Senior Big Data Analyst(Linkedin),SEO & Affiliates Big Data (Group on EMEA). As an efficient professional and leader, he is currently overhauling the Indian Tiles & Sanitary ware space leveraging his magnanimous leadership and business acumen.