Mr Viresh Sheth, The Founder-Director & CEO at Shriyata Lifetech
This time we had with us, Mr Viresh Sheth, the founder-director & CEO at Shriyata Lifetech. He completed his bachelors in chemical engineering from Bangalore University in the year 1993 & his journey started when he finished engineering & worked at one of the leading biotech companies, Biocon Limited.
“This journey was a learning phase for me & a huge contributor to what I am today.”
He started his career in R&D, being responsible for product scale-up and process development. He was provided with an opportunity to work in various function including R&D, Manufacturing & Operations after which he, along with his colleagues, had set up the project & engineering team and that’s where the seed of where and what he is today sown. He, along with his team, started to design facilities and infrastructure for the company as an internal team of Engineering, coordinating with various internal stakeholders, engineering consultants and vendors. During his journey as Projects & Engineering team member and lead, Viresh was responsible for setting up multiple facilities including a greenfield site and gained experience in design, build and commissioning of different kinds of facilities and functions including, but not limited to, manufacturing facilities, fermentation facilities, API facilities, aseptic process facilities, medical devices facilities, biologics facilities, R&D facilities, administrative facilities, contract research & manufacturing facilities, clinical research facilities, etc. He continued to work with Biocon Group for around 23 years before he decided to hang his boots there. Still, during that process, he practised in every type of infrastructure that was inevitable for any pharma, bio-pharma facility. In his interview, Viresh also thanked Biocon Group’s leadership and management for giving him the opportunity of running the office for design services, engineering services as an internal department. In the year 2016, when he left Biocon & joined Mylan’s in the injectable division as the head – projects, he had to put up with new sets of challenges there. However, it gave him a different kind of exposure in the field of aseptic processing in pharmaceuticals and novel delivery technology for injectables.
In the year 2018, he decided to start something on his own, that is when Shriyata Lifetech was born in May 2018. Viresh, along with his team, is focused on end to end engineering service for pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical, medical devices and related industry. Along with a differentiator of offering process engineering and process scale-up as a primary offering & that’s what creates the story where Viresh has started in 1993 to where he is today.
Viresh says that the industry is fascinating and challenging. One needs to keep up with the continual changes and revisions on regulation and technological advancements. He says it is one field which has kept him challenged all the times & that’s what he loves the most about the industry.
Viresh explains that learning from the mistakes, planning your work meticulously & its execution, transparency & communication with all the stakeholders combined with the ethical values of honesty & integrity has been the building blocks of his successful career. In terms of smooth project execution, he says, that defining the scope as straightforward as possible is very crucial, which would eventually avoid frequent changes. He also states that declaring the budget before putting upfront efforts on the conceptualisation of the project, kills it because the management is given a wrong impression of what the budget would be. In contrast, the budget could be different once concept engineering is done.
According to Viresh post covid 19 one of the most significant challenges would be creating the right infrastructure within said geography, not only in India but throughout the world and the young aspirants in the industry, Viresh believes that start somewhere, in the first place, & as early as possible because this is the industry where money doesn’t turn around overnight. It is so because infrastructure and pharmaceuticals take time. Most importantly, do not get into something without passion and thinking there is a plan ‘B’ because if you love something, you’ll make way for success.
