All you need to know about Bala

Passionate About Teamwork and Continuous Learning

Dr. Balakrishnan. A.S., or Bala as he is popularly known, is a Chennai based senior automotive professional with global center of excellence experience and a good cross-cultural team leader.

He is a passionate and energetic supply chain management/ material planning and logistics leader with strong business acumen. He is currently working at Ford Motor Private Limited as Vice President - Material Planning & Logistics. Previously, Bala was the Deputy Director at Changan-Ford automobile company Limited, a Joint-venture based at Chongqing, China. Bala is an expert in managing culturally diverse team and has proven track record of delivering results at market, regional and global levels.

Bala started his professional career as a management trainee in the production planning and sourcing engineer who undergone intensive training in business process reengineering (BPR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) activities in Chennai based India Meters Limited before shifting to Ford India private limited in 1999.

Bala’s core competencies are mostly associated with planning, developing and directing corporate material planning and logistics strategies and tactics to meet the order to delivery, material flow engineering, packaging engineering, product creation, procurement and change management. He has extensive end to end new model launch and operations skills (innovation, purchasing, prototype, production control, lean material flow, inventory, complexity reduction, balance-out, IT/projects management) with short/long term work experience in China, Taiwan, USA, UK, Germany, Australia, Thailand, Philippines, South Africa, Brazil and Japan.

Post his MBA in operations and Post graduate diploma in business finance (PGDBF) master’s degree from premier institutions, in 2019, Bala has completed part-time PhD in management studies under the faculty of engineering and technology from SRM institute of science and technology. Bala has published the following business articles in reputed international journals and passionate to working on more such articles as an attempt to bridge the gap between industry and academics using his global automotive experience in the field of supply chain management.

PUBLICATIONS (ACCEPTED/PUBLISHED)

Balakrishnan, A.S. and Suresh, J. (2018) ‘Green supply chain management in Indian automotive sector’, Int. J. Logistics Systems and Management, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp.502–523.

Balakrishnan, A.S. and Suresh, J. (2017) ‘Multimodal logistics for Indian automotive sector’, Int. J. Enterprise Network Management, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp.270–289.

Balakrishnan, A.S. and Suresh, J. (2019) ‘A conceptual framework for impact of automotive engineering changes in new product development’, Int. J. Logistics Systems and Management, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp.25–48.

Balakrishnan, A.S. and Suresh, J. (2019) ‘Do you gain by green supply chain management?’, Int. J. Enterprise Network Management, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp.118–132.

Balakrishnan, A.S. and Suresh, J. (xxxx) ‘Role of automotive engineering changes in an emerging market’, Int. J. Logistics Systems and Management, Vol. X, No. Y, pp. xxx–xxx.

Balakrishnan. A.S. and Suresh. J. (xxxx) ‘In-plant lean logistics management: Case study on Chinese automotive practices’ in Int. J. Logistics Systems and Management, Vol. X, No. Y, pp. xxx-xxx.

Balakrishnan, A.S. and Suresh, J. (xxxx) ‘Engineering changes - research findings and future directions’, Int. J. Enterprise Network Management, Vol. X, No. Y, pp. xxx-xxx.