About

Pradeep Dalal started as a mechanical engineer, not a technologist. In 1999 he was doing vendor development for Maruti Suzuki — localizing plastic, rubber and glass components for the Zen and Esteem lines, chasing down water leaks on the factory floor, squeezing $2.35M out of the supply base through value engineering. It was hands-on, physical, unglamorous work, and it taught him what a supply chain actually is before he ever touched a system built to model one.

The pivot came at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, where an MBA in supply chain, operations and IT redirected him from parts and vendors toward the software increasingly running both. He spent the next several years living inside SAP APO — rolling out Supply Network Planning for Unilever across the Philippines and Thailand at Bristlecone, earning IBM's Bravo Award for work on Nestlé's planning process, then running Whirlpool's global APO program across India, Europe, China and the microwave plant in Shunde. By the time he left Whirlpool in 2008, he had built and rebuilt the same planning discipline on four continents.

Coca-Cola is where that discipline found a home for the long term. Starting as a senior business analyst at Coca-Cola Enterprises in 2008, Pradeep moved through senior solution architect roles at The Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages, steadily widening his scope from planning into manufacturing, execution, project management, quality and safety. Since 2022 he has been Product Director at CONA Services, where he owns the planning, manufacturing, execution and sustainability applications running across 11 major North American bottlers — a network representing more than $35B in combined revenue. Sustainability, the newest addition to his mandate, is the throughline into where the next chapter of his career is headed: Industry 4.0, digitization, and making 25 years of Plan–Source–Make–Deliver discipline work for an AI-driven supply chain.