On 15th March 2018, Vinod Gupta School of Management had the privilege of hosting Mr. Palash Lahiri, Director Advisory at EY. Mr. Lahiri has over 15 years of industry experience and has worked for industry stalwarts like KPMG and PwC before joining EY. His area of specialisation includes Process Improvements & Optimization, Risk-based Internal Audits and Analytical Diagnostics, Enterprise Risk Management and Business Process Reengineering to name a few. He has advised several companies in both private and public sectors and his sector of expertise are Power and Utilities, Metal and Mining, Infrastructure and real estate to among others.
Mr. Lahiri gave a very insightful lecture on “Business Consulting – An Insider’s perspective”. He started by explaining what consulting and advisory is and then shared with the students that a trusted advisor should be well connected, responsive and insightful. Mr. Lahiri also shed light on the types of consulting like Operations Consulting, Risk Assurance, Financial Consulting to name a few and he also explained in great details the differences among them and their advantages.
Mr. Lahiri also spoke about the importance of internal audits and internal control for businesses across industries. He gave examples from his work experience where his clients who were big players in their fields had to suffer tremendous losses due to lack of proper internal control mechanisms. After which Mr. Lahiri shifted to talking about Enterprise Risk Management and the steps involved in it. From RACM matrix to Criteria matrix all the important details of risk assessment and prevention were discussed in the lecture.
The session was really interactive and students asked a lot of questions. Due to which several other relevant topics were also discussed. Students got a chance to understand things like the difference in Business and Management consulting, the threat that AI and other technological advancements pose to the field of consulting, how seriously do old established companies take benchmarking compared to new agile startups and skills required to excel in the field of consulting. We got to hear about the consulting world from the horse’s mouth and we are sure this will help all the students who are aspiring to work in the consulting industry.