LTIMindtree’s Prashant Vikas Patil on Cloud Modernization, Retail Logistics and the Future of Intelligent Supply Chains

We sat down with Prashant Vikas Patil of LTIMindtree, who was recognized as a 2026 Technology Innovator by the Tech Ascension Awards, to discuss his approach to modernizing legacy enterprise systems, accelerating cloud transformation, and driving innovation in retail logistics. Patil shares insights into his Dynamic Configuration Driver Engine, the challenges of modernizing mission-critical infrastructure, and his vision for the future of intelligent, self-adjusting supply chains.

What problem were you trying to solve?

At a large retailer, the systems that route warehouse orders and print shipping labels were still running on an IBM AS400 platform. Every time the business wanted to change how orders moved through a fulfillment center, someone had to rewrite code, get it through the vendor, and wait days for a release. In peak season, that delay hurts. Margins in retail logistics are thin, and you can’t afford to be stuck waiting on your own software. I wanted the business to be able to make those changes itself, quickly and safely.

What is the Dynamic Configuration Driver Engine, in plain terms?

It’s a layer that sits between the business rules and the system that runs them. Instead of hard-coding a routing rule into the legacy database, the team writes it as configuration, and the engine reads and applies it at runtime. So a change that used to need a developer, a code review, and a deployment window becomes a controlled configuration update. The legacy system keeps doing what it’s good at, and it stops being the bottleneck.

What results has it delivered?

We used it to move fulfillment operations onto Azure and Manhattan Active across 16 national fulfillment centers, running on Azure Kubernetes Service. The number people notice first is deployment time: configuration changes went from several business days to under 180 seconds, and that speed has saved millions of dollars in overhead and vendor costs. The one I’m proudest of is stability. During the live cutovers, the system stayed up the whole time and processed millions of logistics records without losing a transaction. That’s what earned the business’s trust.

How did you lead a team through such a high-risk change?

I lead a distributed team of more than 40 people across onshore and offshore locations, working on both the new cloud platform and the legacy AS400 stack. With live warehouses on the line, we planned releases around peak operating windows and treated every production cutover as something we had to be able to undo. Each one had a rollback plan and full traceability across Dev, QA, UAT and Production. Being careful early is what let us move fast later.

How do you build a culture where people try new ideas?

I’ve worked on AS400 systems for close to 20 years, so I don’t see legacy code as something to be embarrassed about. It holds a lot of business knowledge. I ask people to understand why a rule exists before they replace it, and then to ask whether it needs to be code at all. I spend real time mentoring on troubleshooting, documentation, and design reviews. When people understand the whole system, they start suggesting the improvements themselves.

What comes next?

The next step is supply chains that adjust on their own. My current patent work looks at event-driven cascaded logic and machine-learning sensor fusion, which could let systems spot a problem and reconfigure before it turns into a delay. I’m also keen to keep giving back to the engineering community through IEEE peer review. Many companies are still where this retailer was a few years ago, and I’d like to help more of them get unstuck.

How did your earlier career prepare you for this?

Most of my career has been about modernizing older platforms without breaking the business that depends on them. At TCS, I led redesign work on mortgage and deposit systems for a Canadian bank. At CGI, I spent nearly ten years with an insurance client, including moving a policy platform from AS400 to Guidewire. Each project taught me the same lesson: the hard part isn’t the new technology, it’s carrying the old business rules across correctly. This engine came out of that experience.