Kavindra is a Principal with Columbus Consulting International, LLC.  Kavindra has been a senior executive at Island Pacific, a product leader at Spotlight Solutions (a markdown optimization pioneer later acquired by ProfitLogic/Oracle), an industry solutions leader for Retail and CPG at i2 Technologies (acquired by JDA) and a Principal in supply chain and operations planning practice at CSC Consulting. Kavindra’s expertise and interests span design, development and implementation of solutions for retail, multi-channel and consumer goods companies. In addition to core merchandising functions, he has been involved in solutions for pricing optimization, assortment planning and allocation, replenishment, forecasting and optimization, supply chain network design, inventory optimization, sourcing to distribution.

Kavindra has an extensive set of consulting experiences as project/program manager as well as lead consultant and SME on significant projects in 6 different countries. His client experiences include Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, BestBuy, American Eagle Outfitters, Big Lots, DSW, Dressbarn Lord & Taylor, David’s Bridal and Syms in retail; Coca Cola, Proctor and Gamble, UDV (Diageo), Lipton (Unilever) in consumer goods and Siemens in technology. His engagements and areas of expertise include price optimization, assortment planning, size buying and pack- optimization, advanced allocation strategies, advanced replenishment on the demand chain side and supply chain design, inventory optimization and operations planning and distribution on the supply chain side. His work includes analytically advanced reasoning, process and organizational transformation consulting in replenishment, and merchandise operations functions, and supply chain analysis, design, planning and decision making.

Kavindra brings strong technical background to his engagements. He has a keen understanding of the software development life cycle best practices and methodologies and has personally developed analytically oriented custom software in Java, C#/.Net, and VBA in use at companies such as Kohl’s, Unilever, Dressbarn, Syms and others. He has worked with software implementations of multiple software vendors, including i2 Technologies, JDA and SAS on areas such as assortment planning, size buying, allocation and replenishment, and price optimization.

Kavindra has a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from The Wharton School and began his career as an Assistant Professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University where his research focused on inventory management, supply chain, forecasting and optimization. He has advised doctoral dissertations, published multiple research articles and given invited talks at the top educational institutions in the country.