PEORIA MAGAZINE June 2023

S P O T L I G H T

As chairman and managing partner of CGN Global at the time, he and his team were helping U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan make urgent, informed decisions in real time through integration technologies that allowed them to “see the entire battlefield,” providing them with the kind of top-to-bottom situational awareness necessary to successfully execute their missions. Guha remembers thinking, “Is there a way to come up with a technology that can do the same thing for a company?” It would take a few more years but out of that experience, Guha’s Peoria based TADA Cognitive Solutions was born, in 2016. Today, TADA is engaged on another battlefront: helping large, industrial supply chains work better – faster, more efficiently, with less waste – for about 50 companies, with more to come as the firm forecasts explosive growth, all from a central Illinois base. Along the way, Guha discovered a pleasantly surprising side benefit: a way for companies to reduce their carbon footprint toward the protection and preservation of a warming planet responding with sometimes devastating climate change. ‘THE MAGIC FORMULA’ “Companies are by definition complex because they have so much to take care of,” Guha, 59, says from the labyrinthine office complex housing his TADA and CGN Global businesses in the 400 block along Adams and Washington streets in Downtown Peoria. To deal with that complexity, busi nesses divided themselves into small, more manageable parts — essentially silos, he said. That created another prob lem, as these silos largely functioned independently, each “working in their own little world,” with limited knowledge or understanding of what the others were doing. The result was “chaos and confusion.” And waste, lots of it — of time, money and unwanted product. Meanwhile, just throwing the newest, shiniest gadgets at companies didn’t mean much if they didn’t have the ability to assimilate that technology into their overall operations and get

those gadgets talking to one another. Guha, the self-described “engineer geek,” relished the challenge. He found his inspiration in nature, which starts with a building block: DNA. “In nine months, it grows into this little person that’s amazing,” able to learn, understand, evolve and respond to the world, Guha explained. So, if companies also have a distinct DNA, what if you could isolate it in a kind of reverse-engineering process and create a “digital twin,” from which you could visualize the entire playing field and experiment with potential solutions? What if you could apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to assemble and digest vast amounts of data, and essentially connect the company’s left brain – the ability to grasp that information and make in-the-moment decisions from it – with its right brain and its predictive capabilities? And what if you could take a process that once took 24-36 months and reduce that down to 12-24 weeks? That, in a nutshell, is what TADA – an anagram for the word “data” — helps companies do. “It’s not just about collecting data. It’s about understanding the world we live in,” said Guha. “That is the magic formula.” A REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE All of this can be hard to get your brain around, so to simplify, let’s say you need a lawnmower. For that tool to be available when you walk into your local home improvement store, its manufacturer must first coordinate with perhaps 300 different companies and the 800 different parts they make, all of which have to be assembled into that one piece of equipment, said Guha. “The average supply chain is a 500-player game” between manu facturing, assembly, distribution, transportation, etc. “This thing has to come together, layer after layer.” Now, throw in multiple, unforeseen shocks to companies and their supply chains: A global pandemic, supplier

TA-DA! IT’S TADA! Seshadri Guha and his team are transforming industrial supply chains, and taking on global warming too

BY MIKE BAILEY PHOTO BY RON JOHNSON

F or Seshadri Guha, the inspiration for his current company came out of his consulting work on a battlefield 7,000 miles away, some 15 years ago. manufacturing solutions; Ravi Uddavolu, senior VP of industrial and automotive, and Seshadri Guha, CEO TADA's senior staff, from left to right: Denny Tu, senior vice president of integrated product and customer success; Kiran Khadke, senior VP of CPG and

30 JUNE 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE