Kaustav Sen: Most Influential SAP Transformation & Digital Innovation Leader – 2025

Introduction

In a rapidly evolving digital economy where operational resilience, speed, and intelligent automation determine competitive advantage, few leaders embody the synthesis of strategic vision and technical mastery as completely as Kaustav Sen. As a Solution Architect at PHINIA and a seasoned SAP transformation leader with over 15 years of global experience, Kaustav has consistently delivered complex enterprise programs that translate technology investments into measurable business outcomes. His leadership stands out for uniting integrity, collaboration, and innovation with an unrelenting focus on simplification and scale. It is for these reasons that CToday Awards recognizes him with the title Most Influential SAP Transformation & Digital Innovation Leader – 2025.

This profile traces Kaustav’s professional journey, the defining principles behind his leadership, the signature achievements that distinguish his career, and his perspective on the future of ERP, AI, and digital transformation. It also offers pragmatic insights for aspiring professionals seeking to build meaningful and enduring careers in enterprise technology.

A Journey Shaped by Scale, Complexity, and Outcomes

Kaustav’s career is rooted in large-scale SAP programs across the automotive and manufacturing sectors in North America, EMEA, and APAC. Beginning at TCS, he was entrusted early with major ERP rollouts and global S/4HANA transformations for high-value clients that demanded precision, foresight, and deep alignment with business strategy. For a Tier-1 automotive client valued at 18 billion dollars, he designed a tax model that reduced costs by 50 percent. This was not an isolated point solution, but a decisive piece of functional architecture that reshaped financial efficiency for a global enterprise.

At Capgemini, Kaustav accelerated his leadership trajectory by helming a greenfield S/4HANA program for a 13 billion dollar manufacturing organization across five countries within 12 months. Delivering a multi-country greenfield landscape on that timeline requires more than methodology. It calls for mastery of data design, process harmonization, governance, stakeholder orchestration, and risk management. It also demands the ability to translate business imperatives into a coherent, standardized template that can be adopted at pace without sacrificing quality or controllership.

Today at PHINIA, Kaustav leads enterprise-scale transformation with a relentlessly pragmatic lens. He has successfully steered a 500 million dollar UK Aftermarket ERP transformation and delivered it in eight months. This result reflects an approach that balances strategic clarity with operational precision. His current focus is equally forward-looking: guiding PHINIA from legacy SAP toward the next generation S/4HANA suite, while embedding Generative AI and SAP Joule AI to drive automation and elevate the user experience. Every initiative under his leadership aims to simplify complexity and bring tangible value to business users.

Behind these milestones are obstacles that seasoned leaders in ERP understand intimately: disentangling systems during divestitures, harmonizing global processes across regions with differing regulations and practices, and driving adoption among business users who must work faster with new tools while maintaining quality and compliance. Kaustav’s results illustrate a consistent ability to address each of these realities head-on. He emphasizes organizational alignment and change effectiveness as much as technical implementation. A transformation only succeeds when people adopt it confidently.

Leadership Principles: Integrity, Collaboration, and Innovation

Kaustav’s approach to leadership is grounded in three principles that guide his decisions and his teams.

• Integrity: He prioritizes transparency, ethical solutioning, and alignment with business goals. This is not just about governance. It is about building long-term trust with stakeholders and delivering solutions that will stand the test of time. Integrity ensures that architecture decisions are made for clarity and value, not for convenience.
• Collaboration: Transformations at enterprise scale succeed through cross-functional trust. Kaustav cultivates collaboration across business, finance, operations, supply chain, tax, and IT. He leads diverse global teams as true partners and invests in stakeholder listening and co-creation. His philosophy of mentorship, open communication, and accountability builds teams that are resilient and motivated.
• Innovation: For Kaustav, innovation is practical. It focuses on simplifying complex processes, embracing modern architectures, and driving automation where it meaningfully reduces friction. Whether harmonizing global ERP process templates or embedding Generative AI into workflows, his bar for innovation is measurable impact. He favors scalable blueprints that can extend across countries and business units without creating fragmentation.

These values translate into day-to-day leadership behaviors. He advocates for crisp governance structures, lean decision-making, and testable value. He insists on process-first thinking to avoid technology for its own sake. And he brings a proven playbook for program acceleration without compromising quality. The result is a culture where teams feel empowered to take ownership, deliver on commitments, and raise the bar for what transformation can achieve.

Recognition and Motivation in 2025

In 2025, the recognitions that resonate most with Kaustav are those that celebrate digital transformation, AI-driven innovation, and operational excellence. These are not just categories but commitments he lives through his work. He is inspired by honors that spotlight leaders who generate measurable impact for both business and society. Awards that value transformational change and resilience align closely with his philosophy: technology must simplify complexity and unlock tangible value for people, teams, and communities.

The CToday Awards title Most Influential SAP Transformation & Digital Innovation Leader – 2025 reflects the arc of his influence. It acknowledges a career defined by speed with substance, innovation with integrity, and transformation with adoption.

The Future of Enterprise Technology: AI, Cloud, and Composable ERP

Kaustav’s perspective on the future of the ERP landscape is grounded in clear trends already taking shape at leading enterprises.

• AI-powered Automation: Generative AI and predictive analytics will enhance planning, order fulfillment, and decision-making by reducing manual effort, surfacing insights, and guiding users through context-aware prompts. Kaustav sees these capabilities shifting enterprise systems from systems of record to systems of intelligence, where the platform recommends next best actions and anticipates risk.
• Cloud-first and Composable Architectures: Cloud ERP will provide scale, flexibility, and evergreen capabilities. Composable design will enable organizations to assemble best-fit capabilities around a stable ERP core, integrating adjacent systems like e-commerce, warehouse automation, and compliance platforms through robust APIs and event-driven patterns. The result is agility without chaos.
• Process Simplification as a Strategic Priority: The focus will move away from upgrade cycles toward simplifying global processes and driving standardization with controlled localization. This is essential for sustainable growth, resilient operations, and auditability. Kaustav believes simplification accelerates value capture and reduces the cost of change.
• Integrated Digital Backbones: Tighter integration across front, middle, and back office will eliminate silos, improve speed to serve, and enable better governance. ERP will serve as the backbone of digital transformation, coordinating data integrity, process orchestration, and compliance while allowing innovation at the edges.
• Sustainability and Resilience: The next generation of ERP programs will embed sustainability metrics, supply chain resilience, and regulatory compliance into core processes. Planning and execution will be increasingly model-driven and simulation-ready, giving leaders a real-time view of risk, cost, and performance.

This outlook is not theoretical for Kaustav. It is reflected in his current work, where AI and cloud-native ERP play a central role in user empowerment and business scalability.

Mentorship and Team Development

Leaders who deliver repeatable success invest deeply in people. Kaustav emphasizes mentorship, open communication, and accountability as the bedrock of team performance. He nurtures future architects by helping them master fundamentals, interpret business needs, and communicate solutions with clarity. His teams learn to navigate stakeholder dynamics and manage ambiguity. They also learn resilience, a crucial attribute in programs where competing priorities and evolving requirements are the norm.

This emphasis on people development creates high-trust and high-accountability environments where individuals grow while projects succeed. It enables distributed leadership, which becomes essential in multi-country rollouts and global transformations.

Guidance for Aspiring Professionals

Kaustav’s advice to the next generation of ERP leaders is concrete and actionable.

• Build strong fundamentals in ERP processes. Understand order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, plan-to-produce, and record-to-report beyond the surface. Depth creates confidence and adaptability.
• Balance technical expertise with business acumen. The best architects translate complexity into practical, outcome-driven solutions. They speak the language of both the CFO and the warehouse manager.
• Embrace innovations like AI and cloud ERP, but tie them to measurable outcomes. Technology is meaningful when it improves decision cycles, cost structures, service levels, or risk posture.
• Develop cross-industry domain knowledge. Exposure to automotive, manufacturing, healthcare, and other sectors strengthens pattern recognition and architectural versatility. It also increases empathy for diverse operating models.
• Seek challenging opportunities and remain adaptable across geographies. Global exposure sharpens judgment and equips professionals to harmonize processes across different regulatory and cultural environments.
• Keep innovating. Curiosity and continuous learning are differentiators. The enterprise landscape changes quickly. Leaders who learn faster lead better.

This playbook echoes Kaustav’s own journey and offers a pragmatic path for professionals who aspire to deliver at scale.

Why Kaustav’s Influence Matters Now

The stakes of digital transformation have never been higher. Supply chains face volatility. Markets demand speed. Regulators expect transparency. Workforces need tools that support them in doing more with less. Leaders who can wire together technology, process, and people into an operating model that thrives under uncertainty are rare. Kaustav Sen is one of those leaders.

His record spans cost transformation for global enterprises, accelerated multi-country rollouts, and next-generation programs that put AI at the heart of the user experience. His leadership is principled and practical. He champions integrity as a foundation for trust. He brings people together to solve hard problems. He pilots innovations that are scalable and grounded in value.

The CToday Awards recognition highlights not only previous achievements but the trajectory of influence that Kaustav brings to the field. It recognizes a leader who consistently converts strategy into adoption, who sees the enterprise as a living system rather than a stack of applications, and who is shaping the future of ERP to be intelligent, integrated, and humane.

Closing

Kaustav Sen exemplifies what modern enterprise leadership should be. He is a builder of systems that work, a mentor who elevates teams, and an innovator who measures success by outcomes that matter. In honoring him as the Most Influential SAP Transformation & Digital Innovation Leader – 2025, CToday Awards celebrates a professional whose work sets a benchmark for excellence and whose values define a standard for leadership. His journey offers a roadmap for how to deliver transformation with speed and integrity, how to harness AI and cloud without losing sight of human experience, and how to turn complexity into clarity for organizations that aspire to scale with confidence.