Prof. Venkat is a faculty in Operations Management and Quantitative Techniques Area and Director, Center for Manufacturing Excellence (C-MaXel) established as one of the centers of Excellence focusing on Applied Research. He received his Ph. D. from Anna University, Chennai. He was on deputation for one year at IIM Bangalore on his research work.

He has published more than 60 technical papers in International and National Journals and conferences. His research work appeared in National journals (IIIE, JSIR) and International Journals (IJPR, IJPE, PPC, IJOMAS, AJTOM, IJICBM, IJTSDM), National conferences (IIIE, ORSI, AIMTDR, IIPE, etc) International Conferences (like INFORMS, ICPR, OR, POMS, ICOQM, SOM etc). His research and consulting interest includes Operations Management, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Sourcing, Service Operations, Modeling and analysis of manufacturing systems, Lean Manufacturing, Quality and Productivity Management, Design and analysis of Inventory systems and Allied areas. He also organised number of Management development programmes for working executives in the area of OM and allied areas.

He has more than 16 years of teaching, research and consulting experience gained from premier institutions/organizations from India and Singapore. He worked as a faculty in Industrial Engineering Department at Guindy Engineering College, Anna University, as a SCM Lead Engineer (Research) at Honeywell Labs, Singapore and Research Fellow at Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) Program, Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He also worked as a faculty at IIT Madras before joining IIM Indore in February 2005.