// PREYAN J — THE PERSON BEHIND THE PAGE

PREYAN J

Procurement mind. Engineer's eye. Builder at heart.

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// THE STORY

I didn't plan to end up in procurement.
But looking back, it makes perfect sense.

Chemical Engineering teaches you to think in systems. Every process has inputs, outputs, and points where things can go wrong — and when I stepped into procurement, I realised most people in the room had never thought about it that way. That gap became my advantage.

"I can read a technical spec, talk to an engineer, and negotiate with a vendor — all in the same afternoon."

Over four years I've worked in renewable energy and large-scale infrastructure. I've been part of teams building wind farms. I helped source and import the waterproofing materials for one of India's longest sea bridges — the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link. The work has taken me into supplier factories, customs offices, freight negotiations, and finance reviews. I've never once been bored.

At night, I teach myself to code. Not because anyone asked me to — just because I wanted to understand how things are built. This site is proof of that. It's also proof that the same curiosity that made me a good engineer is still very much alive.

// WHAT I ACTUALLY DO

Three things I'm genuinely good at

⚙️
SOURCING & NEGOTIATION
Finding the right supplier at the right price with the right terms. I've consistently cut costs without cutting corners — the two are not the same thing and knowing the difference matters.
📊
SPEND ANALYSIS & DATA
I built live spend dashboards from scratch using Dynamics 365 and Excel. I know what's being bought, by whom, and whether it makes sense. Data only helps if someone actually reads it.
🌐
GLOBAL IMPORTS & COMPLIANCE
Bills of Entry, customs compliance, freight negotiation, CHAs — I've managed full import operations for EPC projects under real deadline pressure with real consequences.
FEB 2022 — MAY 2024

Where it all
began to click.

TREMCO CPG (INDIA) PVT LTD · CHENNAI

I walked into Tremco as a fresh Chemical Engineering graduate who had studied thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and reaction kinetics — and had absolutely no idea what a purchase order was. That first week was humbling in the best possible way. There's a specific kind of learning that only happens when you're thrown into something real, with real stakes, and told to figure it out.

What I quickly discovered was that procurement isn't just about buying things. It's about relationships, timing, trust, and knowing exactly when to push and when to hold back. I learned to read vendors the way I used to read process diagrams — looking for where the pressure builds, where the inefficiencies hide, where you can make something work better than it has before.

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."
— Mark Twain

Then came the project that changed everything. The Mumbai Trans Harbour Link — one of the longest sea bridges ever built in India — needed waterproofing materials imported from overseas, coordinated through a web of freight forwarders, customs agents, and L&T project timelines that did not forgive delays. I was handling the procurement end of it. The first time a shipment clears customs on a tight deadline and you know you made that happen — there's nothing quite like it. I was hooked.

SAP HANA became second nature. Supplier negotiations stopped feeling like confrontations and started feeling like conversations. I learned that the best deals aren't won by being the toughest person in the room — they're won by being the most prepared one. By the time I left, I wasn't the same person who had walked in.

MAY 2024 — PRESENT

Building things
that actually last.

GURIT WIND PRIVATE LIMITED · CHENNAI

Joining Gurit felt like stepping into a different league. Wind energy is not a forgiving industry — the components that go into a turbine are engineered to exacting standards, the supplier relationships that keep them coming require genuine trust, and every procurement decision sits on a chain that eventually affects whether clean energy gets generated or doesn't. That context changes how you think about the job.

The core of the work here is indirect buying — CAPEX and OPEX procurement across global sites, running full purchase-to-pay cycles, managing supplier onboarding through SEDEX sustainability audits, and keeping a complex supply chain moving across time zones and currencies simultaneously. On any given week I'm negotiating with a vendor in one country, coordinating a delivery in another, and reviewing contract terms for something that won't land for three months. I've gotten good at holding a lot of threads at once without dropping any.

The supplier negotiations here carry a different weight than anything I handled before. The vendor base is global, the stakes are higher, and there's less room to recover from a bad call. I learned quickly that the best negotiation isn't the most aggressive one — it's the one where both sides walk away believing the relationship is worth protecting. That mindset has consistently delivered better outcomes than any hardball tactic I've seen tried.

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."
— Warren Buffett

Along the way, I also noticed that spend visibility was a real gap nobody had addressed. So I built spend dashboards in Dynamics 365 and Excel that gave leadership something they could actually act on. And when an opportunity came up to lead a green energy initiative that brought facility energy costs down meaningfully, I took it — not because it was in the job description, but because it was the right problem to solve and I knew how to solve it.

2021
// WHERE IT STARTED

The degree that started it all.

SRIRAM ENGINEERING COLLEGE · CHENNAI
2017 — 2021

It started with a question I kept asking in class — "but how does this actually work in the real world?" Four years of Chemical Engineering gave me a way of thinking that I didn't fully appreciate until I walked into my first procurement role and realised nobody else in the room was thinking the same way.

Engineers are trained to see systems. They look at a process and immediately start asking where the inefficiencies are, where the failure points live, and what happens if one variable changes. Turns out, supply chains are just another kind of system — and that instinct became my biggest professional advantage.

Most buyers learn the process. I learned the product first. That difference shows up every time I sit across a table from a vendor, read a technical specification, or spot a risk that nobody else flagged. The degree didn't make me a procurement professional — but it made me a better one than I'd otherwise ever be.

B.TECH · CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
// OPEN TO THE RIGHT OPPORTUNITY

Let's build something worth buying into.

If you're looking for someone who thinks like an engineer, negotiates like a professional, and builds things from scratch after hours — I'd genuinely love to talk.

EMAIL ME LINKEDIN