Girish Ramachandran

Girish M Ramachandran has 24 years of experience carrying out more than 270 positional assessments, business viability reviews, feasibility studies, proposal evaluations, strategy exercises, due diligence exercises, turnarounds, valuations, business plans, masterplans, special administrators, receiverships, liquidations, restructurings, investigations and various consultancy assignments on corporate entitles for Governments, management, shareholders, lenders and prospective investors.

He has managed consultancy assignments involving projects with transaction values in excess of RM1 billion, development values in excess of RM20 billion and carried out advisory to the largest companies in Malaysia and South East Asia.

He started his career with Ernst & Young in the audit, restructuring and corporate finance teams. He was head hunted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in their corporate finance and management consulting department. He then joined a global enterprise as head of Finance prior to joining RSM as head of consulting for RSM International Malaysia’s business. Heading the consulting for RSM in Malaysia, he is continuously invited to private consulting tenders from Economic Planning Unit, Ministry of Finance, Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy, Iskandar Malaysia, Northern Corridor Economic Region and East Coast Economic Region development councils and agencies.

One of his notable engagements was assisting to project lead for Fortune 500 Petronas to prepare the regional development Master Plan for Eastern Corridor of Malaysia (now called ECER). ECER today is successfully implemented, which mirrors the Economic Transformation Programme of Malaysia even before it was prepared and has achieved 90% of their planned investments of RM112billion.

In 2014, Girish made a strategic move to sign a partnership alliance with EC Harris LLP global built assets consultancy and led their strategy and transformation division in Malaysia supporting projects in Asia. He was then selected to co-head the Big Urban Clients programme in Malaysia for Arcadis NV (parent of EC Harris). Girish then headed Arcadis’ Business Advisory business for Arcadis in South East Asia. Arcadis has 27,000 people with annual consulting revenues in excess of RM10 billion and is the leading global natural and built asset design and consultancy firm for design, consultancy, engineering, project and management services. In 2015, Malaysia’s Land Public Transport Agency engaged EC Harris (currently merged into Arcadis) to develop a 45 year Socio Economic Plan around Stations and Nodes to maximise the economic benefit for the country arising from the High Speed Rail link between Kuala Lumpur & Singapore. Girish also led this assignment together with his Business Advisory team in South East Asia and he delivers work across various large MNCs and private sector clients, developers and shareholders.

Girish speaks regularly at conferences and seminars within ASEAN on corporate performance and strategic planning, as well as contributing to several knowledge articles in the media and industry. He also sits on various social services NGO organisations. He was in 2012 nominated one of Malaysia’s Top 15 Entrepreneurs by Prestige’s Top 40 Under 40 Awards. Girish is an Accounting graduate from the University of Kent at Canterbury, United Kingdom and loves playing golf, eating wine gums and driving fast cars.

Selected Project Experiences:

1. Business Process Re-engineering for a National Oil Company (NOC) in Southeast Asia. Re-engineered the business & work processes for project delivery units of the NOC, and led the strategy formulation for Portfolio Planning, Organisational Structure, Value Engineering, and Change Management

2. Mid-term Review for a Nation-wide Industry Transformation Program in Southeast Asia country. Devised an outcome-oriented review mechanism to transformation program, and re-aligned the initiatives & KPIs in tandem with outcomes desired

3. Socio-economic Development Actions Plan for a Cross-nation Railway Project. Led the formulation of land value capture strategy and developed a comprehensive socio-economic development actions plan to maximize the economic benefits arising from the development.

4. Township Management Model & Revenue Strategy for a National Financial District. Developed a township management model for the District Manager and built a full-fledged financial model to captured the life-cycle costs.  Led the value engineering and revenue strategy formulation process to optimize operational cost and revenue

5. Competitive City Masterplan for a Capital City in Southeast Asia. Led the formulation of masterplan and devised strategies in forms of Policy, Program, and Projects, to build up the competitive level of the city. Facilitated several large scale workshop to captured innovative ideas and secure buy-in from government agencies and project implementer.

6. Smart Cities Blueprint. Led the formulation of framework for Smart Cities-related development and devised strategies in forms of Policy, Program, and Projects. Developed the implementation, monitoring and governance mechanism for the execution of smart cities developments

7. Business Planning & Funding Strategy for Unique Healthcare Provider. Led the formulation of business strategy for an unique healthcare services provider targeting Southeast Asia market. Advised on the funding strategy and involved in bringing in the investors.

8. Cost-Benefit Analysis for Port Terminal Gateway at One of The Busiest Port in The World. Conducted value engineering exercises to optimise the life-cycle cost of operating the projects. Quantified the economic benefits and devised a sustainable business model after extensive sensitivity analysis.

9. Masterplanning & Business Strategy for One of The Largest Halal Hub in The World. Led the vision development, formulation of master plan, business strategies and implementation structure. Devised 23 flagship projects and 153 detailed implementation plan.