Consulting & Professional Services Perspectives

Submitted by I Putu Mahendra Wijaya, Co-Chair of the Management Consulting Club

Hitachi Global Solution Corporate Talk by Mr. Michael Travis, Chairman Emeritus

On Friday, 14 November 2014, the Nanyang Business School has been fortunate to receive a visit from Mr. Michael Travis, chairman emeritus from Hitachi Solutions Ltd. The Management Consulting Club, together with the Wine Appreciation Club, has been honored for being given the trust to host him throughout his visit in Nanyang Business School.

The event started at 15h30 with a presentation by Mr Travis titled “Consulting & Professional Services Perspectives”. Within the presentation, Mr Travis shared with the attendants of his experience heading Hitachi Global Solution, as well as some the recent important trends in the professional service industry.

Some of the interesting insights that he shared is the scale and revenue partition of Hitachi as a conglomerate company. Founded in 1910 by an engineer Namihei Odaira, Hitachi has grown from its initial business in electric induction motors into large conglomerate in Japanese industry. As of 2014, Hitachi businesses encompass areas from Digital Media all the way to Construction Machinery. No doubt that Hitachi has been recognized in the world as one of consistently top performing companies, as evidenced by its annual subscription to be listed in Fortune 500 global companies. As of Financial year 2013, Hitachi reported top line revenue of $93.4 billion from all of its business units, one of which is Hitachi Global Solutions, which Mr Travis had the experience to lead & grow the business.

Furthermore, Mr. Travis also shared his insight about the future of consulting industry. One of the important trends, he pointed out, happens in the sphere of IT development. In particular, he argued that the development of the “internet of things: manufacturing 2.0” – where machine can have “social network” between them – would unleash a tremendous potential in the manufacturing in the new world.

Important around the idea of internet of things is the capability of machine to collect data, thanks to proliferation of sensor, and processes them in real-time to be presented either to another machine – which would help crunch those data – or to a human user – who will make the final critical decision in real-time if any intervention is needed. Such real-time data gathering & information processing will bring efficiency to a level never before attained in the past, simply because the availability of data which were not present.

As such, the development of internet of things becomes not only the latest fad in the technology world, but could have a tremendous impact in the sphere of strategic planning and decision making in the business world, particularly in the sector of manufacturing and public transportation. Indeed, one of the key takeaways from the presentation is the implication of the internet of things to the consulting industry: we can expect that the internet of things would create a middle-field battle ground between companies that traditionally offers services in strategic consulting, and those that customarily offers services in IT consulting.

After an interesting presentation, the attendants were then entertained with a fine selection of wines, cherry-picked by our wine connoisseur, Ms Stephanie Zhao – c0-chair of Wine Appreciation Club; accompanied with excellent light snack matched against the wine, finely selected by our caterer Fusion Spoon. All in all, the atmosphere of the entire session was very collegiate, and we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to talk in person with someone as important as Mr Travis.

Indeed, the Management Consulting Club and Wine Appreciation Club hope that the event could mark as the beginning of long-term relationship between the Nanyang MBA program & Hitachi Global Solutions. Bonne Continuation!