End-to-end project ownership across greenfield and brownfield mandates — concept to commercial launch, with full P&L accountability.
Capital projects rarely fail in the technical domain alone. They fail at the seam. A process design that is defensible on its own terms meets a cost model built on utilisation nobody stress-tested. A vendor qualified on unit price cannot hold a delivery drumbeat once the order book tightens. A plant that reaches nameplate on paper is quietly derated because an ambient design temperature was never revisited after the site shifted 400 km inland.
Techno-commercial evaluation is the discipline of holding both halves of that seam at once — the physics and the money — and refusing to let either one be assumed. It is the difference between a Detailed Project Report that passes an investment committee and one that survives its own second year.
The practice works on capex projects in high-voltage equipment, railways, cable and cable accessories, battery energy storage, oil and gas, metals and mining, and general heavy engineering, in India and with European counterparties. Typical entry points are a greenfield line whose business case has not yet been pressure-tested, a brownfield asset that is capacity-constrained for reasons nobody has isolated, or a technology transfer where the commercial terms and the engineering package have been negotiated by different people who have not spoken to each other.
Greenfield work is sequencing under uncertainty. The decisions that dominate lifetime cost — plot layout, utility sizing, single-line architecture, the choice between a bought technology and a developed one — are all taken while the least information is available and are the most expensive to revisit.
The practice takes end-to-end responsibility across that sequence: site evaluation against power availability and grid connectivity, water and effluent load, logistics corridor and axle-load limits, workforce catchment and applicable state incentive terms; basic and front-end engineering; statutory clearance mapping — consent to establish and consent to operate from the State Pollution Control Board, factory licence, PESO where hazardous area classification applies, CEA and DISCOM approvals for grid-connected assets, IBR registration where steam plant is involved; procurement strategy; construction and erection supervision; pre-commissioning, and the performance guarantee test run that actually closes the contract.
Two things are worth attention because they are where schedules go. Statutory clearances are almost never on the critical path in the plan and almost always on it in reality — consent conditions can force a change in stack height or effluent routing after civil work has started. And type testing of long-lead equipment at an accredited laboratory carries queue time, not just test time; for high-voltage apparatus that queue can be measured in months and needs a slot booked before the design is frozen, not after.
Most brownfield capex proposals arrive with the constraint already named, and the name is often wrong. A line described as press-limited turns out to be limited by changeover time and an inspection queue; the proposed second press would have added 40 per cent of capital for 8 per cent of throughput.
The practice starts brownfield work with measurement rather than specification — takt and cycle data against actual demand variability, OEE decomposed into availability, performance and quality rather than reported as a single number, and a constraint analysis that survives a shift-by-shift look. Only then is the capital option set built, with the do-nothing and the low-capital cases costed as seriously as the expansion case. In a meaningful share of engagements the answer is a smaller cheque than the one originally proposed, spent somewhere else.
A feasibility model is a hypothesis about the future written in arithmetic. Its usefulness depends almost entirely on whether the assumptions are visible and whether the sensitivities are honest.
Models are built with the cost build-up traceable to quotations, drawings and consumption norms rather than percentage allowances, with contingency treated as a distribution rather than a flat ten per cent, and with the two or three variables that actually determine the outcome identified explicitly. For most industrial assets those variables are capacity utilisation in years one to three, input cost pass-through, and working capital cycle — not the discount rate, which is where committee discussion usually concentrates.
| Layer | What is modelled | Where it commonly breaks |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | Design capacity, derating, yield ramp, consumption norms, availability | Nameplate used as year-one output; learning curve ignored |
| Capital | Equipment, civil, utilities, erection, spares, pre-operative, IDC | Utilities and erection under-scoped; spares omitted entirely |
| Operating | Input costs, energy, manpower, maintenance, logistics, overheads | Energy priced at current tariff with no open-access or demand-charge structure |
| Fiscal | GST credit flow, customs duty on imports, depreciation, applicable incentives | Incentive assumed as certain rather than probability-weighted |
| Financial | IRR, NPV, payback, DSCR, break-even utilisation | Single-point answer with no sensitivity band presented |
Where a project draws on Indian schemes — production-linked incentives, state capital subsidy, export promotion capital goods, bonded manufacturing arrangements, or the newer central research and innovation financing instruments — eligibility conditions and claw-back terms are read as engineering constraints, because that is what they become. A local-content threshold changes the sourcing architecture; an employment condition changes the automation case.
Stage-gate processes decay in a predictable way: gates become review meetings, review meetings become status updates, and a product reaches tooling with an open technical risk that everyone remembers raising and nobody remembers closing.
The practice's role in NPI is to hold the gate. That means defining exit criteria that are testable rather than aspirational — a design freeze evidenced by a released drawing set and a closed design FMEA, not by a slide saying design is frozen — and being willing to hold a gate closed when the criteria are not met. It also means carrying the commercial line through the gates alongside the technical one: target cost decomposed to sub-assembly, a landed-cost view including duty and freight, and a pricing corridor tested against the competitive set before tooling is ordered rather than after.
Supply chain architecture is a design activity. Deciding what to make, what to buy, and how many sources to qualify for each critical item is a set of engineering trade-offs about capability, capacity, tooling ownership and intellectual property exposure — not a procurement clerical task.
Work here covers make-versus-buy analysis with tooling amortisation and IP ownership treated explicitly, supplier capability assessment on the shop floor rather than by questionnaire, process audits against a defined standard, first article and run-at-rate qualification, and dual-sourcing strategy for items whose failure stops the line. For regulated sectors it also covers the approval architecture — for Indian railway supply, for example, the vendor approval route and the category of source being sought materially change the qualification timeline and must be planned as a project of their own.
Entering an adjacent vertical with existing capability is a different problem from entering a new geography with the same product, and both are usually attempted with the same plan. The practice separates them: capability-adjacent entry is a qualification and standards problem, geography entry is a channel, certification and warranty-exposure problem.
For an Indian manufacturer moving into European supply, the binding constraints are typically conformity assessment and documentation rather than technical performance — declaration of conformity, technical file, harmonised standard selection, and the willingness of a European customer to accept a supplier without a local service footprint. Those are addressable, but they need to be costed into the entry case rather than discovered in the first tender.
A technology transfer that consists of drawings and a training visit will not reproduce the process. What transfers a technology is the tacit content: process windows and why they are set where they are, the inspection points that catch the failure modes that actually occur, the fixture design decisions that make an operation repeatable, and the deviation history that explains the drawing tolerances.
Engagements cover transfer package definition and gap assessment, know-how documentation, process and control plan transfer, jig and fixture localisation, qualification runs at the receiving plant, and the commercial architecture — royalty basis, field of use, territory, improvement rights and the treatment of background versus foreground IP. The engineering package and the agreement are drafted against each other, so that what the contract promises is what the documents can deliver. Legal execution sits with the parties' counsel; the practice supplies the technical substance the agreement rests on.
Most engagements begin with a bounded diagnostic — typically two to four weeks — producing a written statement of what the constraint is, what the realistic option set looks like, and what the next phase should cost. That output is usable on its own; a client who takes it in-house from there has had a successful engagement.
Execution phases run against a defined gate structure with named deliverables and a single point of accountability. Where the work carries P&L consequence, the practice will hold that number rather than advise around it. Site presence is planned where physical verification changes the answer — supplier assessment, construction supervision, commissioning — and avoided where it does not.
NaraNova Tech LLP is based in Vadodara, Gujarat, and is registered under Startup India / DPIIT (DIPP271026) and Udyam (UDYAM-GJ-24-0239773), and is GST registered. The LLP was incorporated in May 2026; the practice behind it carries a record of 100+ patents delivered (including PCT filings) and 25+ simulation projects across nine industrial verticals.
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