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ValueLabs is a global technology services and solutions company. ValueLabs provides end-to-end solutions in the fields of Customer Experience, Data & Analytics, Product Development, and Automation.
Founded in 1997, ValueLabs has expanded from a team of three people in Hyderabad to 31 locations worldwide today. With a global workforce of over 5500 associates, 150 clients across the world, ValueLabs has recorded an industry-leading client Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 84 in 2020.
The company was built on a set of core values, encapsulated in the ValueLabs 'Stack', which is the operating philosophy of the company. The cornerstone of these values is a commitment to 'doing the right thing' by all stakeholders in the ecosystem.
The business model is centered around building trust with clients and employees, creating an inspired and collaborative environment.
Innovation is a core layer of the Stack where the focus is to bring Design and Technology together in order to drive business impact and digital transformation for their clients.
Arjun Rao is the Founder and CEO of ValueLabs. He provides strategic direction to the company and strongly believes that one can learn and achieve anything, when driven by 'character strength' and the 'strive for perfection'. These beliefs have been instrumental in the journey of ValueLabs since its inception.
Arjun holds an MS Degree from Cornell University and a Bachelor's Degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.
He leads by example when it comes to doing the right thing at all times, inspiring everyone in the company to build trust with clients and colleagues alike. He has contributed to bringing alive the OneCompany model of engagement.
Digital transformations could look very different for companies from different industries, of different sizes and having varied existing technology and business landscapes. Therefore, ValueLabs designs and implements digital transformation to suit the unique needs of each client, in order for them to be successful.
Every digital journey will nessecitate expertise in one or more of the following elements: The business strategy & the business model, tools & technologies, people & processes. The two frameworks that they have developed and employ, that encapsulate these aspects are the 'The Digital Flywheel™' and the 'Engineering Canvas'.
'The Digital Flywheel™' is the solution design playbook that is effective in driving digital transformation for companies with different business needs. Focused on business strategy at the core, the Flywheel uses different elements from multiple disciplines like User Experience, Analytics, Automation, and Product Development to design solutions that address unique clients' business needs best.
ValueLabs, as a company, is agnostic to specific tools or technologies and leverage them as enablers to address their clients' requirements.
Each tool and technology come with pros and cons, and it is never a one size fits all solution. The technology landscape (especially in the Data and Analytics space) evolves rapidly – with new tools coming out frequently – that a lock-in to a particular tool or technology does not serve evolving client requirements optimally.
With dedicated Center of Excellence (COE) teams that constantly evaluate and run pilots with different tools and technologies that are available, they are able to look at clients' business needs and constraints and recommend the most appropriate technology stack and design the right solution for them.
The 'Engineering Canvas' is a best practices toolkit that consolidates ValueLabs' extensive experience of over 23 years with recommendations, templates, assessments and guidelines across each aspect of any digital initiative – Consulting, Design, Requirements Gathering, Customer Development, Architecture, Data and Cloud, DevOps, Analytics, Quality Engineering, etc. This enables all clients to sustain their digital transformation initiatives with best-in-class practices and standards incorporated.
ValueLabs works with clients in the Big Data & Analytics, AI–ML and RPA space and has contributed significantly to large scale digital transformations leveraging these technologies.
The company has also conducted hackathons on platforms like HackerEarth, encouraging AI-ML, RPA and Cloud enthusiasts worldwide.
Social responsibility and doing the right thing for the community has been a conscious effort right from the founding days of the company. This can be seen even in some of the the digital solutions that they have developed. One such solution is an NSFW (not safe for work) content moderation tool called "ValueLabs Sift," which helps catch explicit content ensuring a safer society.
These are just some examples of how ValueLabs has used emerging technologies to contribute to the nation and society at large.
The impact of technologies such as Cloud Computing, IoT, Big Data & Analytics and Artificial Intelligence will be far-reaching. They stand to disrupt the status quo in almost every industry in every country, emerging or developed. This tech-driven revolution will force many companies to change their operating paradigm, from being manpower-intensive to being technology-centric. They will alter the way people live and work, rearrange value pools and lead to entirely new products and services. Companies can leverage these technologies to reshape their organization's business model and develop new ways to deliver and capture value. In fact, given the COVID crisis that humanity is going through today and the consequent remote working which it has entailed, these technologies increasingly come into the forefront.
The emphasis on constant innovation at ValueLabs is critical to their success. Opportunities within Cloud Computing today are significantly different from that of two years ago. The kinds of frameworks which exist in AI and Deep Learning today have seen a radical transformation from what they were just seven months prior. In order to stay relevant and ahead of competition, you have to constantly pilot these new features and capabilities which is intrinsic to the ValueLabs Stack.
The world is seeing a surge of technologies that are significantly altering how businesses operate and these technologies are disrupting the overall industry outlook. ValueLabs sees two waves emerging in the landscape of disruptive technologies – the Innovation wave and the Adoption wave. The innovation wave cannot sustain itself without people adopting the technology.
ValueLabs has found a good balance between both innovation and adoption. This implies that the company can innovate through a focused COE approach and enable clients to adopt innovative technologies in meaningful ways. Some of the notable projects they have worked on are:
Big Data and Cloud transformation for one of the largest market research companies in the world:
Their client had an on-premise and legacy technology landscape with data factories geographically dispersed – both independent and silo-ed. The architecture was monolithic, and scalability became a problem with the existing on-premise setup. It would have taken a minimum of three weeks to process the data and deliver insights to their end clients.
ValueLabs re-architected their platforms and applications for microservices and multi-tenancy and enabled the Cloud transformation journey. It also implemented the components using Lambda and step functions and leveraged dockers to address any gaps. Continuous monitoring and reporting were implemented with cost optimization strategies to ensure the transformation met the business goals. Moreover, it automated the KPI generation and re-architected its data platform to establish a single source of truth for faster insights.
As a result, ValueLabs brought down the time to insights from 3 weeks to 1 day, reduced manual effort by 97%, and reduced the opex spend by 85%, enabling high-impact business transformation.
Computer Vision (CV) and Extended Reality (XR) for a leading insurance ISV:
Claims management and repair estimation, which are primary services that the client provides – were manual, time-consuming, and expensive processes to carry out. The client wanted to disrupt the industry they were a part of and re-imagine how the automotive claims management and collision repair estimation were done.
ValueLabs designed, developed and deployed a custom Computer Vision solution that included an ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This solution helps to take the image of a damaged vehicle, identifies different parts or panels present in the image and then determines which operation is suitable for that panel (repair, replace etc.). This allowed the manual teams to validate claims much faster and serve more customers.
The company created an XR solution over the CV solution allowing technicians in repair shops to scan and assess a damaged vehicle in a completely hands-free manner through smart glasses. Details of the owner from driver's licenses or the mileage from the vehicle dashboard would be automatically extracted by ValueLabs's solution and input into the end system, transforming the way technicians went through the check-in process. This industry-first solution was created on all the leading smart glass providers (Google Glass, Vuxiz, Realwear) as each end client had their preferences and constraints. The company's tool and technology–agnostic approach allowed it to meet all their user users' needs effectively.
With these solutions, ValueLabs could process 40 claims per minute and enable a great hands-free experience for all technicians!
Arjun reveals the secret sauce that sets ValueLabs apart from anyone in the same industry, are the company's founding values that are enshrined in what he calls the ValueLabs 'Stack'. The Stack guides the culture, engagement model and innovation construct with a laser focus on two stakeholders – the clients and the employees. These two stakeholders also happen to be the key drivers for any innovation, as the client's business goals and use cases are innovated for by employees with the domain and technical expertise to implement it end-to-end.
Being privately held, ValueLabs is uniquely positioned to take a long-term view with any client partnership and focus on building trust, investing in clients' needs, taking on their business objectives, and working towards common goals as opposed to chasing quarterly targets. This is reinforced time and again, as clients rely on ValueLabs to bring in thought leadership, technology, and design expertise to add more value to their end customers and business.
"Our client NPS of 84 is testament to the trust, integrity and competence that we bring to our clients," says Arjun.
Another key aspect that sets ValueLabs apart from other technology companies is its capability to access, retain and inspire talent. The talent war in the tech space makes it very challenging for any company to help their clients ensure business continuity and smooth delivery. ValueLabs' average employee tenure and employee NPS of 57 (which is about 4 times the industry average) validates the team's commitment to ensuring that every employee is engaged and motivated. A global presence with centers in Bucharest, Malaysia, Cebu, Dubai, Darlington, Chicago, Costa Rica and India allows flexibility and diversity of talent – creating the perfect environment for innovation.
ValueLabs has received notable recognitions and awards in recent times, owing to its best-in-class services. This includes:
German Design Award, 2021 for Excellent Communications Design – Brand Identity awarded for ValueLabs rebranding project
Dream Employer of the year – 2020, World HRD Congress, for three consecutive years
Company of the year – 2020 (IT & software sector), Business Leader Awards
The Digital Technology Award – 2020, Business Leader Awards
Top ITES exporter award – 2019, HYSEA Annual Innovation Summit & Awards
Most Innovative IT solutions Partner (India) – 2018, cfi.co
Today, location is digitized, and extreme remote working has become the norm. The outsourced, offshore model of working will open up further due to the sheer amount of talent and competence that exists.
The one area of focus for the company will be to constantly innovate and ensure that the culture and values at ValueLabs remain intact as the workforce scales and gets more distributed.
Companies that do not have mature remote working practices will not survive and sustain this wave. Security, Agile Delivery and remote collaboration for Data and Analytics transformation projects will be critical.
ValueLabs' experience of over 23 years of extreme remote working with teams by collaborating across various geographical locations across the world, from different time zones in the agile model has allowed it to standardize tools and hone high quality and mature best practices. Which is consolidated in its 'Engineering Canvas.'
Arjun finds that an increasing number of clients are relying on ValueLabs for innovation and end-to-end digital transformation, right from ideation and design through to solution deployment and support. He adds, "We have brought our design and technology competence together in our Imagine! model of engagement." Every client is looking to engage with ValueLabs through this model and the team considers this as a roadmap for the future. Arjun is confident that the engagements going forward are going to be innovation-led, where the company would don the proverbial 'VC hat' and deliver robust, high-impact solutions to its clients.a
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