Working @ Home | Pushpender Raghav
05 May 2020
A Portrait of Pushpender RAGHAV
Operations Team Manager, India
April 2020. Interview with Pushpender Singh Raghav, Manager of the Indian Operations Team.
How would you describe your role at QOS Energy? Please tell us about your occupation and missions.
Alongside my team, I am in charge of operations related to Indian renewable plants and portfolio. My responsibility is to run operations in a streamlined and efficient manner.
Operation missions revolve around two main areas:
- Onboarding and configuration of renewable assets – wind, solar and storage – in the Qantum® cloud platform.
- Provide support, training and consulting services to clients.
Onboarding happens after a contract or order is signed with the client. During this phase, we connect to the plant, collect the data and configure the client’s renewable analytics environment into the Qantum® platform.
“We sometimes have to onboard over 100 plants for new clients and we need to have a standardised and industrialised approach for this. “
Furthermore, we provide continuous support to enable our clients to monitor their assets’ performance seamlessly. At last, we aspire for the clients to use Qantum® at its full potential. In order to do so, we give trainings and conduct knowledge sharing sessions and advise them about KPIs and industry best practices.
What do you enjoy the most about working here?
Having worked with TCS, Accenture, Amplus Energy Solutions pvt. Ltd, I acknowledge these organizations had their positives, many good things about them. Though, one thing I’ve realized working with big organizations, is that hierarchies are very strong. There, the person who are top in hierarchy get more respect compared to the new joiners.
However, after joining QOS Energy, I believe respect for individual is here for everybody regardless of the position or designation. If job requires, everyone is approachable irrespectively of seniority in the organization. This stands apart QOS Energy from the other companies I worked for.
Lastly, resources here are not just seen as employees who get paid to do their work, but as fellow humans, it is very good for positive and stress-free work culture. So personally, I really enjoy working with QOS Energy.
Can you tell us about your background and how you come to work for QOS Energy?
I started my career as a core IT person. After 3 years with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in the SAP related project, and five years in Accenture as a techno-functional resource in ERP and IoT, my interest drew towards renewable energy.
I was then preparing a business case for EGAT (Electricity Generation Authority of Thailand) on how to increase revenues and reduce expenses by using the IoT-based digital solution in the energy supply chain, and energy assets they were managing. During that project, I got really interested in the renewable energy sector, and later joined Amplus Energy Solution Pvt. Ltd. – one of the leading solar developer in India – as a Project Manager.
There, I gained experience as a project manager in the energy domain and acquired knowledge of the life cycle of a solar plant, from the early stages of feasibility study till the final commissioning and performance monitoring. I finally joined QOS Energy where I can keep working in the RE domain while leveraging both my project manager and IT background.
What are you working on at the moment?
Presently we’re dealing with various clients in India and APAC, whose cumulative assets reach a 3.5 GW portfolio.
“Our core responsibility is to ensure our clients are able to monitor the performance of their thousands of plants in the best possible way. We have a very dedicated team having a single point of contact for our clients, so that we can work closely with their remote operations team. With a target-based objective approach, we help them save manpower efforts and money wherever we see the scope for improvement.”
Moreover, we conduct weekly brainstorming sessions to identify the new business requirements. Understanding how they monitor their assets is decisive, as every client have their specific needs and challenges. We aim to create a feedback loop, and regular sessions allow us to grasp the client’s goals, which KPIs to prioritize and how to guide them in their use of the platform.
Once we’ve collected the business requirements, we run multiple internal analysis sessions with the Indian and French team. We leverage the experience of each project manager and mutualize our experience with clients. Regularly all the project managers sit together, discuss, and they do cross learning. That’s how we find the best possible solutions and frame the implementation and assets performance strategy for our clients.
Have you met any challenges or special accomplishments you would like to talk about?
I would mention two specific success here. First is enabling one of our large-company clients to generate a single page portfolio performance report for their 40+ plants daily. Previously, different people would have to compile all the information of their 40+ plants in an excel sheet, later converted in PDF and emailed to the involved stakeholders.
But thanks to the advanced reporting feature of Qantum®, we are able to gather all the financial and operational performance KPIs of these 44 plants in a single page report. That report is automatically generated and sent across different emails IDs, while a copy also gets saved for future reference in the platform. Furthermore, that report is customizable. If tomorrow, a client feels like adding more KPIs, that can be done in a very fast paced manner. This was a challenging but very fruitful activity, which is finally delivered.
A second important accomplishment is for another of our key client, that owns a wide portfolio of over 900+ PV rooftops. Using again our reporting feature, we have allowed them to generate monthly bills to their end-customers, remotely with automated reports. Automated report-based billing helps the client by suppressing the need of physical visit on their multiple plants. Considering physically visiting each plant and checking the reading and then generating the bill, versus everything else done automatically from Qantum®, there is no comparison frankly speaking.
To deliver all this, we’ve been coordinating closely with the headquarters team. Such fruitful collaboration is key to reach the right person, swiftly address technical issues and to combine expertise and experience from our clients across the globe.
Apart from your work at QOS Energy, do you have side projects or hobbies outside the office?
Yes, I do have! I like to write short stories on my spare time, primarily in the domain of comedy, and sometimes horror as well. I also enjoy shooting random videos and edit them in a meaningful, interesting way for the viewer.
My biggest achievement on that side, is that I happened to be part of an international documentary film made on India, called “India in a day”. I am credited as one of the co-directors for my contribution to this documentary film, as an actor as well as a content provider.
