Leading SMEs of India 2021

41 Experts' View Leading SMEs of India 2021 How would you describe the journey of your company since its inception? What are some of the key milestones of the company in recent years? Established in 1991, Onward Technologies is a publicly listed digital & engineering services company. We’re a preferred technology partner for Global 2000 businesses in Transportation & Mobility, Industrial Equipment & Heavy Machinery verticals. Our portfolio includes digital engineering, embedded systems, smart manufacturing, supported by core capabilities that bridge the physical and virtual: design, testing, value engineering and AI, ML, analytics. As a digital first business, we offer the distinct advantage of low-risk/high-return engagements, client proximity through 13 offices in 6 countries, and the agility to ramp up engineering teams—both on site and offshore. For our clients, the net results are in the form of outsized returns on their speed to market, R&D investments, applied innovation & competitiveness. What are some of the innovative initiatives taken by your company Onward Technologies Limited Jigar Mehta Managing Director in recent years? How have those initiatives helped your organization? Over the last two years we’ve hit several corporate milestones. We built a substantial team of young leaders with deep expertise in advanced technologies and a winning track record in focused verticals. As part of our growth strategy, we’re steadily increasing wallet share at our top accounts. This reflects our alignment with clients’ vision, deep expertise bench, digital-first thought leadership, and nimbleness. Additionally, our investments in the US/EU sales force, back-end automation, and owned delivery centers continue to drive offshore leverage and margin expansion. Over the last 18 months, we have invested heavily in becoming a Digital first company for all our internal processes. We have embraced the latest technology solutions to primarily transform legacy business processes, significantly reduce manual efforts, enable us to work in a more agile manner, automate several important workflows and business processes across almost all departments and functions. These technologies will also empower our sales, delivery & recruitment teams to grow our business rapidly, become more competitive and develop the ability to better meet customer expectations. We’re also a Debt free company and in May 2021, saw a private equity placement validating our efforts. Onward Technologies is well placed to participate in the $100B-by-2030 ER&D growth run outlined by NASSCOM. I am convinced these measures will help us deliver on our promise of consistent double-digit growth for the foreseeable future. What is your company’s growth strategy for next 3-5 years? We have predominantly been focused on the India market (MNC customers with captive centers in India) where 95% of our 2200+ employees are based. Over the last few quarters, we have reprioritized expansion and opened offices across North America (Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto) and Europe (London, Frankfurt & Amsterdam) to be close to our new clients. Our strategy is to build on these relations andmake our international business contribute close to 70% + of our consolidated revenues. To enable that, besides investment in technology and automation, we have started hiring aggressively a lot of experienced talent and leaders from Tier1 digital engineering companies. We remain confident that we have the right customer focus, business model providing flexibility, agility, speed of execution, experienced leadership, and we will be able to deliver record growth. Dun & Bradstreet