Five minutes can be a surprisingly expensive unit of time. Ashish Kataria once watched a frontline employee wrestle with a system for about that long. The scene was ordinary: a person, a task, a piece of software that had presumably passed its tests. Yet the struggle revealed enough friction for Kataria's team to redesign the workflow. He says the observation prevented months of rework. Enterprise technology enjoys grand nouns - transformation, modernization, intelligence - but this story begins with a verb. Watch.
Kataria, the co-founder and chief executive of Epik Solutions, has turned that verb into an operating principle. His teams do not begin by appointing a fashionable platform as the answer. They map how work moves through an organization, including the awkward handoffs and manual habits that rarely appear in a sales demonstration. Only then do they decide what to integrate, what to replace and what to leave alone. The option to leave a useful system in place is revealing. A system that works does not become an enemy merely because a new quarter has begun.
“Start with process, not tools.”Ashish Kataria
This is Kataria's central argument: software should follow the choreography of work, not force the work to flatter the software. In his telling, clarity arrives through proximity. He spends time with operators, reviews active engagements each week and looks for friction in real environments. Industry reports may describe the weather. Someone clicking the same box twelve times can show you where the roof leaks.
From computer science to the business of friction
Kataria studied computer science at San Francisco State University from 1998 to 2001. His public professional record then travels through digital sales and management, with leadership experience associated with Microsoft, Wipro Technologies and Sutherland. It is a useful pairing: technical depth on one side, the commercial discipline of persuading organizations to change on the other. He says his own leadership has moved gradually away from providing answers. Early on, technical depth held his attention. Today, he spends more time asking questions than giving instructions.
In October 2015, Kataria and his partners founded Epik Solutions in California. The company works on customer, employee, IT and back-office systems for enterprise clients, with teams across the United States, India and Mexico. Kataria stays involved in strategy, major client engagements and solution design, while delivery leads carry the promises into execution. He describes the core architects, engineers and transformation leads as primarily in-house. Select partners may supply a niche capability or regional presence, but responsibility remains with Epik Solutions.
Managing across those time zones, he says, has demanded process discipline. His culture language is similarly operational. Epik Solutions supports global work-from-home flexibility and measures output rather than hours. “Work should fit into life,” he says, describing it as policy rather than a slogan. Continuity matters because services companies sell accumulated context as much as technical labor. The engineer who remembers why a strange integration exists may be more valuable than the diagram that forgot to mention it.
A transformation has four acts
The workflow map is only the opening scene. Once the actual process is visible, Kataria's model asks a practical set of questions: Which systems still earn their keep? Where should data move? What must employees learn? After launch, who remains long enough to watch real behavior alter the plan? Epik Solutions provides stabilization support, usage monitoring and optimization cycles. Some clients continue under managed-service agreements; others return for quarterly reviews.
The workflow-first sequence
Kataria's accountability rule appears at the end: when adoption is low, his team treats it as a system issue rather than a user issue. This does not absolve everyone of learning. It simply refuses the convenient fiction that a technically functioning product must also be a usable one. The go-live date proves that code moved into production. It does not prove that work improved.
“If adoption is low, we treat it as a system issue, not a user issue.”Ashish Kataria
Before a project begins, Epik Solutions defines KPIs and documents service-level indicators. Reviews happen on a fixed cadence. Kataria says roughly 90 percent of revenue comes from repeat business, a figure that makes the post-launch phase economically legible. The company is not merely tidying up after itself. It is building the conditions for a longer relationship.
The profitable elegance of saying no
A services company can grow itself into a swamp by accepting work that has no shared definition of success. Kataria says Epik Solutions has turned projects down. If client leadership is not aligned, the firm does not engage. If the expectation is a complete replacement without studying the workflow, it steps back. His minimum conditions include executive sponsorship, defined goals and measurable KPIs.
These boundaries reveal the logic underneath the method. Workflow analysis is not decorative discovery. It is how the parties find out whether they are solving the same problem. Without alignment, a project can hit every milestone and still disappoint every person in the room. A signed scope is useful; a shared picture of the work is better.
Before accepting the work, ask whether an executive owns the outcome, whether the goal can be measured and whether the team is willing to study the existing workflow before prescribing replacement.
The same conservatism shapes pricing. Defined projects use milestone-based structures, while larger programs may connect phased payments to deliverables. Managed services recur monthly. Kataria does not publish project prices, but he insists on tight scope and cost tied to business impact. “We do not oversell features,” he says. It is a line that would improve several software conferences if printed above the doors.
AI with somewhere to be
Kataria is interested in applied AI, especially predictive analytics linked to infrastructure resilience. The distinction matters. Epik Solutions runs controlled internal pilots before recommending new capabilities to clients. If a pilot cannot produce measurable improvement, it does not scale. The test is not whether a model can perform a trick. It is whether an operating metric moves in the desired direction.
That focus has carried the company toward AI-driven data platforms, climate technology and wildfire-mitigation initiatives. Kataria has also written about field-to-cloud infrastructure: predictive maintenance for pipelines, analysis of vegetation risks, and automated inspection and compliance. These are environments where a pretty answer is insufficient. The value appears when a system helps prevent a failure, routes attention sooner or removes repetitive administrative work from a field team.
Epik Solutions has developed View360, a platform intended to map an organization's business experience, and its company site also advertises work across data modernization, cloud, customer experience and geographic information systems. Yet Kataria's philosophy leaves the platform in its proper place. The tool is part of the response. The observed workflow supplies the question.
Patience as an operating system
A revealing test of an employee-first statement arrives when the spreadsheet becomes impolite. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kataria says Epik Solutions chose not to lay off employees. Keeping the workforce intact required financial discipline and close pipeline management. He believes the result strengthened internal trust. The decision fits his broader argument about continuity: stable teams retain the context that supports consistent delivery.
There is a connection between this people policy and the client method. Both depend on resisting disposable thinking. Employees are not interchangeable hours, and existing systems are not clutter simply because a vendor has released a newer version. Kataria's approach asks what knowledge already exists, where it lives and how change might preserve it. That makes transformation less like demolition and more like careful renovation. The point is not to keep everything. It is to understand the load-bearing walls before anyone swings a hammer.
Kataria's ambition for the next five to ten years is expressed without theatrical acceleration. He expects Epik Solutions to expand its platform capabilities, particularly in AI-driven operational intelligence, while maintaining a focus on climate technology. He favors steady growth over rapid scale. For a founder in enterprise technology, this is almost mischievous. The industry keeps a stopwatch on the table; Kataria keeps returning to the map.
His personal leadership shift offers the quieter ending. More questions, fewer instructions. More observation, fewer predetermined answers. A transformation project can easily become a monument to certainty, erected before anyone visits the site. Kataria's alternative is humbler and more demanding: stand close enough to see what people actually do, define what better would mean, and let evidence decide what deserves to change.
The five-minute struggle matters because it interrupts abstraction. Somewhere behind every enterprise diagram is a person trying to finish a task before lunch. Watch that person. The software can wait its turn.