PERSONALITY 26 May 24-30, 2014 TheSouthAsianTimes.

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By Staff Reporter
E
nvironmental pollution, income dispari-
ties, and large scale industrial accidents
are commonly cited as inevitable but
unintended social consequences of global eco-
nomic progress. Nonsense, argues
Chandrashekar Natarajan, one of the global
business executives recognized through ICICI
Banks NRI of the Year awards in Mumbai ear-
lier this year.
These adverse social conditions, explains
Natarajan, are the result of repeated failures to
understand systems and their second and third
order effects. And he is determined to change
all that. He was recently recognized as the
Supply Chain Practitioner to Know by Supply
& Demand Chain Executive for his outstanding
contributions to Supply Chain. This was the 5th
time he was awarded with this honor.
As Vice President of Business Process and
Technology, Integrated Supply Chain
Management for the Walt Disney Company,
Natarajan commented, My passion is to
ensure that all whose lives are touched by the
global supply chain have the opportunity to
earn their living in an ethical, safe, secure, and
sustainable working environment, at the
awards ceremony this past March. His inte-
grated global strategy is based on a systemic
method for analyzing problems, one of his
seminal contributions to modern industrial
engineering.
I have chosen to make my mark on this
world as an engine of social change through
business. I focus on the process by which fac-
tories, vendors and suppliers thousands of
miles away from their primary customer, man-
ufacture and ship productsthe system known
as the global supply chain.
Widely acclaimed in the field of supply chain
management for his innovative problem solv-
ing strategies and understanding of multi-order
effects, he is the co-author of three ground-
breaking booksSimplified Systemic Network
Planning: Six Steps to Effective Network
Planning (VDM Publishing, 2008) with Lee
Hales; Supply Chain Talent Building an
Innovative, Integrative, Inclusive, Inspiring,
Intellectual Supply Chain Culture that
Produces Incredible Impact (In Press) with Ron
Hammond; and Amazing Secrets of Planning
(In Press). He has also penned more than 60
articles on a host of topics and is a sought-after
thought leader for industry trade programs
such as the Supply Chain Logistics North
America conference and expo, Logicon, and
OpsInsight.
His insights and influence are grounded in
diverse experience with three of the worlds
leading and largest beverage companies, Coca-
Cola, PepsiCo, and Anheuser Busch InBev, as
well as with The Walt Disney Company. At
Coca-Cola, for example, he challenged the
existing paradigm in the beverage industry as
he introduced game-changing business delivery
systems that have transformed the field. His
innovations established a new delivery stan-
dard, CoolLift, that completely re-imagined the
assets, labor resources, and timing of deliver-
ies. His logistics infrastructure roadmap great-
ly improved how Coca-Cola delivers value to
its customer while reducing overall delivery
costs by 2.5% annually. More important, his
systemic analysis of the delivery process led to
changes that reduced worker injuries by 97%,
removed the physical barriers that created de
facto gender bias, and reduced the carbon foot-
print of the delivery system by 50%.
At PepsiCo, his exceptional performance
won him the Supply Chain Innovation award
by the Council of Supply Chain Management
Professionals; and the company honored him
as one of the companys rare and distinctive
Best of 2009" out of their 67,000 employees
worldwide, Natarajan also brought innovation
to talent management. His management sys-
tem, applied also at his subsequent assignment
with Anheuser Busch InBev, improved reten-
tion by 33%, and the succession rate by 60%,
and it created a culture that delivered 500%
more cost benefits than expected.
Natarajans fingerprints are spread across the
globe. In Sao Paolo, Brazil, he restructured the
entire network of distribution within the city.
Rethinking traffic patterns, instituting 24 hour
per day schedules, and organizing staging areas
for mini-trucks, small trucks, and even mopeds.
His efforts transformed delivery in the city
from an un-navigable tangle of traffic conges-
tion, to one that functions smoothly at all
hours. In Zambia and Tanzania where 1 in 5
children had died before the age of 10 for lack
of basic medications, he and his team har-
nessed Coca-Colas distribution capability for
delivering medicines at no additional cost
through a charity program called Cola Life.
Natarajan also serves on the Boards of sever-
al for-profit, non-profit, and humanitarian
organizations. In addition, his approach to sys-
temic planning was integrated into the action
plan of the United States National Supply
Chain Resiliency Program under sponsorship
by the White House.
His work on the global and national scales
has not distracted him from local matters. In St.
Louis, MO, where he lived prior to moving to
his new home in southern California, he was
very active with the local temple. He re-engi-
neered the operations of the temples revenue-
generating lunch program, and raised $1.7M
for the temples education center, which pro-
vides 500 students both cultural and spiritual
education, and is central to raising the aware-
ness of the Indian culture and values in the St.
Louis community.
Now at the Walt Disney Company, Natarajan
is a senior executive on the team delivering
technology solutions that align with business
segment strategies, protect brand reputation,
enhance enterprise efficiency, and promote col-
laborative innovation across the enterprise. As
in every other project he has tackled, he is
using systemic planning to optimize the triple
bottom line of profits, planet and people.
He continues to innovate. For Disneys enor-
mously complex world-wide supply chain, he
is currently integrating into his cutting edge
systems design several newly developed tools
and techniques for creating visibility of behav-
iors by all parties to meet the emerging expec-
tations of customers, insurers, creditors, regula-
tors and of course, non-governmental organiza-
tions. From among the many firms at the fron-
tiers of big data analysis, he assembled a busi-
ness and technology team based on their
unique capabilities for localizing and analyzing
diverse information sources for patterns of con-
formance by supply chain members. Knowing
that visibility alone is not enough to insure the
level of supply chain integrity expected by
Disney, Natarajans team is using advanced
incentive programs linked to a variety of insur-
ance schemes. Natarajans goal is to drive the
triple bottom line by fostering conformance
with best practices for the six pillars of reputa-
tionethical/moral behavior, safety, sustain-
ability, quality, security and innovation.
Disney has long been recognized as a leader
in responsible, humane values, often expressed
in entertainment products, but more important-
ly through all aspects of their business conduct.
Natarajan believes that his current system
design process for Disney will establish a new
level of standards for all advanced business
organizations worldwide.
Finding systems solutions to BIG problems
At PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and now the Walt Disney Company, NRI of the Year honoree Chandrashekar
Natarajan is using systemic planning to optimize the triple bottom line of profits, planet and people.
Chandrashekar Natarajan received
the Times Now-ICICI Bank NRI of the
Year award in the Professional cate-
gory in Mumbai this March.
I have chosen to make my mark
on this world as an engine of social
change through business,says
Natarajan.