Why an operating process must preserve the technical distinctions that a familiar product name can hide.
A familiar description can make a replacement request feel straightforward. The customer names a product family, the service colleague recognises it and a component appears in the catalogue. Each step seems to reduce uncertainty. Yet a distinction may still be missing: which revision of the product is actually in use? If that revision changes the component required, the familiarity of the name can conceal the question that matters most. I learned to ask whether our service process preserved that question before it moved an order towards dispatch.
Operations should be able to explain what happens after the workshop calls a job complete. The correct component, a workable repair arrangement and the authority to hold a product all belong in that account. A dispatch date cannot answer those questions on its own.
The COO can own resources and delivery consequences while qualified teams retain the authority to decide technical disposition and release.
Engineering and operations leadership
31 years
Career begins July 1995
Operations colleagues
230
Led through five managers
Annual operations expense
₹46 crore
₹3.6 crore approved annual capital expenditure
The work continues beyond the finished order
I am chief operating officer of Kelthavi Mobility Devices in Rourkela. We manufacture and service manual wheelchairs, walking frames and replacement components through workshops in Rourkela, Cuttack and Ranchi. The company employs 380 people and recorded ₹126 crore revenue and ₹13.6 crore operating profit in the year ended March 2026. My remit includes 230 operations colleagues through five managers, ₹46 crore annual operating expense and ₹3.6 crore approved annual capital expenditure. I report to the chief executive and do not hold a directorship.
I began as a fabrication engineer in 1995 and moved into assistive products six years later. Production taught me to pay attention to specifications and repeatable work. Service taught me that a product's life does not stop at the workshop door. A replacement part can appear correct in a catalogue and still belong to another revision. A repair can be progressing inside our business while the customer has no workable arrangement outside it. A quality hold can be commercially inconvenient and still require the operating plan to make room for it.
The cases here concern compatibility in spare-part selection, temporary arrangements during repair, a quality hold before dispatch and the clarity of service instructions. Each describes a defined group, a cost and the limits of the result. Engineering and quality head Salome Nerzani retains technical authority through qualified teams. Decisions about a person's clinical needs belong with appropriate professionals and the person concerned. My responsibility is to make the operating response clear and resourced, without using a shipment count or an internal task result to imply a clinical outcome we have not established.
A catalogue match needed the correct revision
Among 170 reviewed spare-part requests, twenty-nine selections referred to an incompatible product revision. We funded ₹54 lakh of compatibility-record and selection work, then checked those known cases. Resolving the identified selections did not establish that every future request would be correct.
A repair queue still left people waiting
Eighteen of eighty-six customers in a reviewed repair group had waited more than ten days. We funded a forty-eight-unit temporary loan pool at ₹72 lakh, with suitability reviewed before use. Fourteen of those eighteen repairs later completed; four remained open at the checkpoint.
The release decision survived the production pressure
Engineering placed ninety-four undispatched units on hold after a weld-quality concern. Twenty-eight were reworked and sixty-six replaced at ₹1.1 crore total cost. Qualified teams determined disposition and release; operations funded and organised the response without overruling them.
Current focus
I am connecting workshop completion with the service obligations that remain. The operating account should show which revision a component fits, what a person can use while a repair is open and who has authority to decide whether a product can leave the workshop.
Conversations I welcome
I am considering one external non-executive role in an operations-intensive business, with twenty provisional days a year subject to employer consent, relationship review and the preparation the actual appointment requires.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
Formation
BE in Mechanical EngineeringOvrelia Engineering College · 1995
Postgraduate Diploma in Operations Management, part-timeTershavi Operations Institute · 2004
Miriam put the cost and revised work behind the quality hold into the operating plan. She did not ask engineering to make the finding more convenient so that we could preserve a dispatch promise.
Pranav DeshveliChief Executive Officer, Kelthavi Mobility DevicesThe full record ↗
Contact
I am considering one external non-executive role in an operations-intensive business, with twenty provisional days a year subject to employer consent, relationship review and the preparation the actual appointment requires.