We have fewer women in leadership roles as we are not flexible enough to accommodate them, says Swethnisha Panicker of Merck
In our Women in Tech series, we feature Swethnisha Panicker, Head of Application Technology at the Merck Group. Her portfolio includes global IT programmes, new technology PoCs, and enterprise-scale initiatives across marketing & sales, manufacturing, supply chain, R&D, data analytics and ERP.
Starting with cold calls in a sales job, jumping onto the SAP bandwagon, and moving into core Information Technology, Swethnisha Panicker’s career has not just been diverse, but one of continuous learning.
The Head of Application Technology at Merck Group, Panicker believes a big part of her learning has been about choosing the right environment.
Swethnisha Panicker
“This could be the right organisation within which you choose the right employee, the right team, or the right manager. It depends on your agility to be open to discomfort and take on something you have never dealt with before and upskill yourself,” she tells HerStory.
Agility rightly defines Panicker’s career. Along with it, she has managed to adapt to changing circumstances and pick up new skills along the way.
Panicker grew up in Panandro, a remote village in the Rann of Kutch, near the Pakistan border. She was one of the two girls in her class up to the seventh standard. Later, she moved to Kottarakara, a small town in Kerala, where she continued her school and enrolled for a BSc in Electronics, aiming for a career in defence research.
Unfortunately, she failed to get admission for a master’s in the subject at Pune University. She decided it was the right time to do an MBA and enrolled at All India Management Association in Bengaluru.
A career of continuous learning
Panicker recalls that her first job was in no way related to what she would go onto excel at.
“It was in workplace behaviour–profiling, competency assessments, in hardcore sales. I had one-fourth of Bengaluru as my territory where I sold behaviour profiling tools,” she says.
Panicker believes sales is the best profession to teach you humility, because you face rejections continuously. In two years, she also learned “business acumen is extremely important for success.”
“You may be a techie, but if you are working for a product company, you should know what your product is and what change it is bringing about, otherwise you cannot sell your products effectively,” she adds. After dabbling in core human resources for a year with a small firm, like most people during that time, Panicker too gravitated towards technology.
Her father, seeing her penchant with numbers and solving problems, suggest Systems, Applications and Products (SAP), which would be easy to segue into technology as a career with her HR skills.
After receiving her certification in SAP, Panicker moved to L&T as part of its SAP implementation–support, incident, problem, and change management.
During this process, she became curious about the underlying layer of configurations in SAP.
“I got an opportunity to work in SAP whitespaces, and worked on a residential quarter management solution after moving to Tricon Infotech. For the first time, I was working hands-on with code, and talking the language of developers,” Panicker says.
While at Tricon, she got an opportunity to be a part of Sigma-Aldrich as a consultant where she worked for three years in different roles. Merck acquired Sigma-Aldrich in 2017 and Panicker joined the company full-time six years ago.
She has held several leadership roles at Merck, including Data & Analytics, Custom Applications, and Enterprise UX. Her skills vary from vendor management, IT operations, IT service management, IT audit, budgeting, and financial planning.
Currently, Panicker oversees Merck’s corporate application landscape. Her portfolio includes global IT programs, new technology PoCs, and enterprise-scale digital initiatives across Marketing & Sales, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, R&D, Data Analytics, and ERP.
She manages a portfolio of multi-million euros across eight portfolios and leads a global team of over 1,000 members across India, Germany, the United States, and China.
The use of technology to solve real challenges for business and create differentiating advantages forms the core of Panicker’s work.
A recent project leveraged machine learning techniques and scripting to determine the ‘next best move’ for engaging healthcare providers. Through careful analysis of research and publications impacting Merck's fertility product lines, the team was able to provide valuable insights to sales personnel on vaccine interactions or lack thereof.
Another product from her portfolio—MyMilli-Q™ Remote Care application—built in-house as an accompanying software for MilliQ Labwater products, has been recognised by Business Leadership Awards 2022.
Making herself redundant
“My motive in Merck is to make myself redundant, because every time I make myself redundant, there’s a new opportunity knocking on my door,” she declares.
She continues, “When you take on a job profile, either you are building a team from scratch, or have a team. You are looking at the current status and the opportunities to develop it further, align with the organisation’s vision, and so on. The first three months go into listening and learning. The next year goes into establishing new practices, thought processes, forming a new identity and aligning better and the next year goes into stabilising it.”
Panicker says ideally, in three to four years, you’d have figured out everything in the role, even identified a successor, and even if you took a month off, nothing in the chain breaks. And here is where you have made yourself redundant.
Understanding this redundancy, and changing her role every two years with a hunger to learn has helped her climb the ladder at Merck.
But the rise from a sales job to the head of application technology has not been one without challenges.
“There is a credibility challenge because there are purists always questioning you about technology. Developers would dismiss me outright and say, “Yeh aapko samajh mein nahin aayega.” (you will not understand this). Eventually, you will have to build allies to support you.”
Within a few months into her product development role, she was confident enough to question the developers and build credibility.
Sustaining women in tech
Panicker says it’s heartening to see more women entering tech at the entry-level. But as they began to climb the upper levels, the proportion of women decreases and culminates into single digits at the top-most level.
“The problem is part-organisational and part-societal. We lose a lot of women to life events and the fact that from a management perspective, big companies are still not open to employing women in part-time roles. This will definitely change things on ground,” she avers.
“We have fewer women in leadership roles because we are not flexible enough to accommodate them in the workforce. There are women who can do a day’s work in just four hours. It would be a win-win for a company to employ them,” she adds.
(The copy was updated with additional information from the company.)
Edited by Megha Reddy