Rathin Kumar Chowdhury

About Rathin Kumar Chowdhury

I am a Service Excellence focused enterprise leader with 31+ years of experience in managing mission-critical water and utility services, where reliability, compliance, customer experience, and profitability are non-negotiable.Over the years, my role has evolved from operations leadership to building differentiated service models that help organisations outperform competition through superior service delivery, not just technology.Currently, I head Service Operations across North, East and parts of West India at Thermax, with complete ownership of large industrial water and wastewater assets including ultrapure water plants, CETPs, ETPs and STPs. My mandate goes beyond uptime. It is about creating predictable outcomes, scalable service frameworks, and long-term customer trust.My core focus areas today:• Service Excellence as a strategic differentiator. • Digitisation, Automation & IoT-led service transformation. • Outcome-based O&M models with strong SLA and KPI governance. • Commercial viability, risk management & profitability of service contracts. • CXO-level stakeholder alignment across large industrial ecosystems.With an academic foundation in Electrical & Instrumentation, I bring a strong understanding of automation, control systems, and data-driven operations, enabling the transition from reactive maintenance to predictive and performance-led service delivery.I have further strengthened this orientation through advanced leadership and service excellence workshops with McKinsey and the Great Manager Institute, which have shaped my approach towards: • Customer-centric service design. • Scalable service governance models. • Leadership systems for large, distributed service teams.I believe services are not a cost center, they are a competitive advantage when designed with clarity, discipline, and digital intelligence.

Experience

1. Plant Manager

   Thermax Limited

   Jan 2017 — Present · Jamshedpur, IN

   Heading Service Operations across North, East & parts of West India for industrial water and wastewater businesses. • Full ownership of service delivery, SLA adherence, customer satisfaction and commercial performance. • Driving Service Excellence frameworks to differentiate Thermax services from competition. • Leading digitisation, automation and IoT initiatives for improved asset visibility, reliability and predictive decision-making. • Managing large, multi-location service teams with strong governance, safety and compliance standards. • Acting as senior stakeholder interface with CXOs, plant leadership and corporate teams. • Supporting business growth through service-led expansion, renewals and long-term partnerships.

Education

• Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College

  Bachelor’s Degree, Electrical Engineering Technologies/Technicians

  1990 — 1994