Joby Aviation's Srinivas Suresh on Building Supply Chains for Revolutionary Transportation

It's time to break away from the norm, it's pretty important. Question the status quo, and that was one of my biggest learning is trying to understand why this is a status quo as opposed to why not, right? There's always a question of, this is how we do it, and why can't we not do it any other way. So, I probably put it as a why not approach and also thinking about as opposed to what's possible, then how to make it possible. I think that was huge. Welcome to the Manufacturing the Future podcast, the show designed to help you future-proof your manufacturing operations. Each episode features interviews with innovative manufacturing leaders and subject matter experts who share their insights and best practices about the technology that can empower you to streamline operations, prepare your organization for what lies ahead and continue to keep our world turning. I'm your host, Carrie Jordan, Vice President of Product Management at Epicor now for today's episode. Hi everyone, and thank you for listening. I'm your host, Carrie Jordan. Welcome to our show where we talk with industry leaders who are driving the future of manufacturing. Today, I'm speaking with Strinivas Suresh, Supply Chain Lead at Joby Aviation, which is a California-based company building quiet, all-electric aircraft to connect people like never before, and with the ability to take off and land vertically, the Joby aircraft will change the way we move while reducing the acoustic and climate footprint of flight. A bit about my guest, Strinivas Suresh, is recognized for bringing a dynamic approach to operations. He has experience in scaling product launches from prototype to full production, and his career spans several industries, electric vehicles, commercial drones, consumer electronics, industrial robotics, and now aircraft manufacturing. He's held roles at Nimble Robotics, Apple, Impossible Aerospace, and Tesla. Now as Supply Chain Lead at Joby Aviation, he oversees global supply management, supplier industrialization, and material planning. So talk about emerging technologies and cutting-edge manufacturing. Strinivas, I'm so excited to have you welcome and thank you for joining the show. Thank you for that awesome introduction, Kerry. Excited to be here, and thanks for having me. Of course. Great. First, let's get to know you. Could you tell us about your background and a bit about Joby Aviation? Yeah. But myself. So I hail from India to buy from my schooling for a long time, then we'll state to post your higher education. So bean state bound since 2012 and building my career in procurement, supply chain operations, manufacturing operations, as you said, different roles in different companies and different maturity stages. And yeah, here I am with Joby Aviation, pretty exciting, and talk me about Joby. So yeah, we're building the next generation of transportation, as you said, quite efficient emissions free and saving people time and bringing that much needed transportation for everyone in the world. That's so exciting. And I was just looking at some of the materials that are posted out there about Joby Aviation doing a little bit of homework, and I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson was in the pilot seat of one. That was pretty cool. Yes, indeed. Doesn't it talk for days for Joby Aviation? Yeah. I bet. Yes. Yes. So you have worked across these multiple industries, and they do sound a bit related, right? Because they're very, you know, cutting edge technology. Yeah. So what excites you the most about, you know, the future of manufacturing in these sectors? I think the part that excites me, the same excitement that I had, it tells, you know, the apple and every other company that was previously part of was, you know, focusing on building the new generation of supply chain. And then I thought what supply chain is, I was, you know, what your supplies do, your manufacturing operations, your supply chain operations. It's very difficult when you're working on a new technology. None of these products and manufacturing processes exist. So you're going about building, identifying and building those supply chain. And I think that's the best part of my job getting to do that. And again, on different industries and newer products and technology, that's the best one of my job. I feel like I can relate in product management. We are builders at heart. So it's great to be able to build something. I love it. So it's not always easy for sure, especially when there's so much that needs to get defined or built or it's, you know, going from zero to one. So what are some of the challenges that you've had to face? I guess not only in that building phase, but then once you get to the built from zero to one to maybe one to ten, one to a hundred, one to a thousand, how do you scale? Yeah. The challenges from first principles have been pretty much the same across industries because we're all working towards new technology. Fundamentally, you're after rapid iteration, enabling rapid iteration, you're also working towards a lot of unknowns. Things that you don't necessarily know about, right? The last one is problem solving. I think these are the three biggest challenges when you talk about supply chain manufacturing across the bone and being able to come up with the strategy on how to effectively mitigate these. Maybe, you know, for example, let's talk about rapid iteration. Let's name off the game for all new technologies, right? You know, you're not going to get it right the first time building a strategy on how your drafts rapid iteration, in my view, it's all about design build test run. That's the cycle that you need to expedite the tier of manufacturing partners. If you think about it, this is where industries struggle. Most of the orthodox industry is they struggle to in a way because they're kind of very slow in iteration, which basically means they're not doing fast enough design build test run. So that's one of the key areas as, you know, manufacturing, you want to start thinking about how to be super quick, being able to move with velocity, not just speed but velocity and what I mean by velocity is with the right solution and speed. And sometimes speed just means, you know, picking a solution and running with it, but that doesn't necessarily achieve the results. The second one is looking at the unknown challenges, right? Sometimes you have to work with unknown challenges and it's all about planning for them. Understanding things could go wrong, whether it's from, you know, process, design, material, manufacturing challenges, things that could go wrong and trying to plan around it, whether the plan could be, you know, a simultaneous path of manufacturing or change in material or having manufacturing locations, maybe, you know, Asia is one of them producing the same and not market. So those would be your mitigation plans. And last one, I think it spoke about this problem solving. It's always about understanding the outcome of a problem solving, trying to understand your best case in the worst case. Being able to foresee that is extremely powerful because that kind of gives you the destiny. And these are kind of very typical challenges when you're working on new technology and industry. That's what I've seen in my experience. And obviously the mech comes to the production hell as we all have seen in many companies like, and some companies have done it very well, like maybe talk about Apple, they scale production from 0 to 100 every year. And I think in some cases, probably every six months. And Tesla has been a great example of being able to do it with with Model 3. And they've been able to replicate that with, you know, subsequent, productive manufacturing model Y and so on. But yeah, I think that's kind of the fundamental approach on scaling, production, understanding your challenges and doing from prototype to full scale. That makes a lot of sense. And if we could get a little bit more detail in terms of your experience. So how has that experience that you mentioned, like with Tesla and others really shaped your approach to supply chain management? Quite a lot. I mean, maybe I'll talk about, you know, from a very first principle basis understanding, you know, what not to do. I think that's probably the best thing I've learned across my career. Lesson to learn is what not to do. The thing that kind of pushes you to do the right thing when you automatically decide, this is not what I want to do. And, you know, learning that from scratch, especially when the company itself is building the supply chain is huge because you're part of the process. You're not alone in that learning process. You're with the company that's actually facilitating enabling you to be thinking outside of the box. Right? I could also think about, you know, Tesla or in some cases the startups that I work with, there is a decorum. There is an industry not talk about vehicle like car industry, talk about aviation, trying to break away from the norm is pretty important, question the status quo. And that was one of my biggest learning is trying to understand why this is a status quo as opposed to why not. Right? There's always a question of, this is how we do it. And why can't we not do it any other way? So I probably put it as a why not approach. And also thinking about as opposed to what's possible, then how to make it possible. I think that was huge when I looked back in time at the Tesla Apple and my solid experience, it's always about how to make it possible and not what's possible within that realm. I think those are the biggest takeaways that have helped me over time that I'm trying to actually, you know, as a company in Joby, that we are very, taking it very close to hard and going back to this first principles because they ask these fundamental questions, you're accomplishing your cost, schedule and quality objectives. So when you're in this kind of environment where you are at the cutting edge and as As you said, maybe there are some norms, maybe there's not because maybe it's something that is brand new. How do you create the type of culture where it's okay to, you know, maybe suggest these kinds of ideas that could be very different as you're saying, challenge the status quo? You know, what sort of, how do you create that kind of culture where it's okay to have those kinds of tough conversations? Yeah. I think it stands for leadership for the most part, but then it's too strong. As you need the company that will leadership to be aligned and be able to take outside of the box with you. And then being some great examples like Apple as a phenomenal supply chain, Tesla, Elon himself in this tweet. I mean, you know, he talks about supply chain and manufacturing so much. I think that's being what has really in law, our companies start to think about supply chain. In fact, some of the big supply chain folks come from Tesla and Apple, like I think that's the great example of companies starting to adopt. And the other part of this culture is that you being able to see or Peter trying of companies have been able to adapt their supply chain, being able to build supply chain strategies that are adaptable and susceptible to micro and macro business needs. And also moreover, if you think about designing your supply chain, you want to plan for the best in the worst case scenarios. I think that is really, really important and being able to get visibility on the outcomes of, you know, supply chain engineering and strategizing all the way up to leadership level is important because supply chain is not just about buying something, you know, getting it manufactured by someone and then, you know, adding to your own product. It's no longer that. It's a lot more to that. And I think that's the biggest revolution. Well, I have to ask you about supply chain disruptions, I mean, we're talking a lot about, you know, the resilience and how you can, you know, ensure there's flexibility. So how have you overcome supply chain disruptions? And it would be really interesting to hear about it in terms of, you know, maybe some stories that have happened to you while at Joby or at another organization or maybe those that you've seen in the industry, how are you dealing with those supply chain disruptions? Because there are so many and they only continue to come. I think it's many pronged, one is, you know, thinking from a first principle basis is actually understanding what your constraints are. From a high level, it could be geopolitical tension. It could be material shorters, natural disasters, you know, unforeseen circumstances that can result in disruptions of any kind, right? So being able to meet, understand what those are and trying to build flexibility all the way from design because when you manufacture something, it doesn't stop our start at manufacturing. It should always go back in the lower, it should start from design. When you're designing something, you need to understand how to build flexibility, whether it's picking the material of choice, whether it's choosing a manufacturing process, also a manufacturing location. Some of the examples like in companies that did this really, really well, Tesla did that really well. They were able to overcome the semiconductor shortage, where other car companies were stuck with unfinished inventory, Tesla on the other hand were cranking cars left right and censored. The other one I could think about during what happened Apple was being able to diversify supply chain. He saw something that many companies failed to see at that point in time. They built a whole supply chain, it's a whole levels of supply chain, the tier 2s, the tier 2s and the tier 1s in a whole different country, given that how strong they are footprint is in China. So, those are things that companies have been really, really successful, being able to plan for disruption, but also it's easier said than done. Some of the state years of planning, years of forecasting of what those challenges could be, but it has to happen. I think the first activity is actually being able to forecast your constraints and the relative of disruptions. Well, can I ask you about sustainability? It's a topic that comes up very often among manufacturers, both internationally as well as U.S.-based, and of course with Joe B. Aviation being an all-electric, quiet aircraft. What role does sustainability play within your organization? Yeah, it's fantastic. Sustainability is super, super important to Joe, if you think about it, sustainability center of what we do and of the two, supply chain is really no different, but when it really comes to supply chain in action, we have a job to be done, which is to get the product market. Being able to understand the intersection of sustainability, cost, schedule, manufacturing and business objectives is really, really important. I think our approach has been always thinking about what are the areas where we can have immediate impact and role sustainability in places where we can get the ground running. There are areas, obviously, there are challenges on material prophecies and manufacturing where we do have to think about what that medium and long-term plan looks like. And ultimately, it's trying to build those plans, being able to forecast what those trying driven cost driven challenges are, and being able to commit to those changes is how we see, because as a company, maybe think about, as a pre-eventive company, being 100% solely focused on sustainability is not going to help us head out of the skills, so we do need to take a step back and understand how we can play this out while addressing the business challenges. Right. So that's how we take sustainability at Jerby, and obviously, it's a very big part of what we do here and what we are after. That's great. It's great to hear. We're going to talk about technology and different ways, technologies impacting manufacturing. So I'd love to understand from your perspective at Jerby, and especially as you're looking across the supply chain, what technology have you chosen to leverage? What has had the most impact? And maybe even as you're thinking about the future, what other technologies are you excited about? I think that I feel that we have to continue leverage and work towards this, let me put it this way, intelligence. Data is everything, if you think about supply chain and manufacturing, right? How do you do it, where you buy it, what do you pay, the kind of schedule, et cetera? Being able to build data, scale, data, governing data, analyzing data is going to help you make so many decisions on supply chain and manufacturing, and I feel there's been so much focus on this in the last couple of years. If you think about it, then so many startups trying to preach to companies like you need this data. I agree with them. And I think that's what I'm really, really looking forward to is technologies that are geared towards bringing this data easily accessible and available and enabling decision. And I don't want companies or rather these technologies to stop by just bringing data to the table, but meaningful actions coming out of it and facilitating that is just as important is what I'm really excited about. And also thinking about, you know, in the long run, supply chain systems automation, just having talked about data, supply chain system automation is what is going to really canvas that data across your supply chain manufacturing. If you think about raw material being produced, processed, machined into a part, then finally being put in an aircraft, the data behind that can tell you stories of how you can optimize the cost, quality, and schedule. And ultimately, it is minimizing or rather in other words, maximizing value for every one involved in that supply chain manufacturing and ultimately benefiting the end customer, which is you have maximum value at the lowest cost possible. Yeah. What kind of supply chain insights do you pull from the data that you're leveraging? Maybe like using suppliers or how do you use data across? Yeah. We look at supply location. We look at the revenue, the financial hell, the supply chain risk, or example of, you know, how many logistics disruptions we've had for shipping from Panama Canal as an example. The Swiss Canal is another example. We also look at, you know, quality data, supplier quality sometimes, you know, supplies tend to shift good parts, but the behind the scenes is they're probably throwing half of it away. And you don't learn about it. But when you get the data, you see that something is not happening right. That allows you to go and incentivize to have this discussion with what can we do to help you so that your defeating supply chain nodes are being able to optimize for cost and quality. And ultimately, you're the one to benefit because that specific supplier is no longer throwing 50% of the bottle away. And that's typically how I've seen data being used in many industries, including Tesla and Apple, but the adoption of this has been, let's say, underwhelming in most cases. And I think the last 12, 24 months, there has been a lot of talk about this. So definitely very, very excited. How many other ways that we can think about using this data? Yeah. I'm so glad you brought up data because it is pretty remarkable. The acceleration of technology to leverage it, to collect it, to cleanse it, to make sure that you have complete data, to be making decisions based upon. And then there's also the question of, well, can you trust the forecasts of the data? Should you rely upon the previous information? And it's just interesting the way this is continuing to evolve. When you are empowering your team with data, what steps do you take, or how do you think about. what they should have access to. How do you protect it? Do you have like KPIs that you set up across your business in terms of what they should be working towards when it comes to data? How do you empower your team to leverage it? - Yeah, governance is just as important as having data. And maybe one of the first approaches is building that pipeline of data. Identifying what that data should be. And second is building governance around data. Like who gets to see what? Then using the same data that doesn't start being made out of those actually going back in time can merge with the data that you see. Sometimes you're making a decision that may or may not make sense when you start looking at the data behind it. So it's being able to drive more facts to decision making and being able to justify a certain decision being made because of the data that supports it. And again, quality of data is just as important too. So you want to base your decisions on high fidelity data. And that's also one of the important aspects to look at because sometimes just making a decision on data doesn't mean you're doing the right thing. It's the quality of data that you need to be looking at as well. So it really comes down to building that right pipeline, dominate the data that you want to actually use for decision making is where I would start with. - Yeah, I love that. Thinking about it as a pipeline, then if you feed and then you can leverage the insights that are being delivered afterwards. What advice do you have for other manufacturing leaders that are out there who are likely navigating tight resource constraints, right? There's the fluctuating costs of materials as you mentioned, potential geopolitical, supply chain disruptions on the horizon. There's just a lot of ambiguity out there. What advice do you offer other manufacturing leaders when you're speaking with them? - I try to focus on just one thing. Build strategies that can adapt, that can be resilient. Because if you are building a strategy that's neither of these, then you're kind of stuck. It's important to plan and re-plan and what time is told us again and again is that anything could happen, right? So building strategies are on that. And the last one is embrace, adapt changes. And I think we are slowly moving to a world where AI is taking over. And I do feel in a general sense like AI can supplement the last supply chain decisions, manufacturing decisions. So it's really important that we start embracing these changes. - Great advice. Well, when you're looking out at the different trends that are happening across the industry in manufacturing, and this could even be maybe different technologies that are on the horizon that have maybe not yet been brought to fruition, but you're excited about them. What sort of technologies are different trends in manufacturing? Do you think you're going to redefine supply chain over the next 10 years or so? - I definitely think a lot of being done and talked about robotics. I think combination of robotics and AI is really going to revolutionize supply chain and manufacturing. Right now, if you think about manufacturing cars, vehicles, they have high level of automation. If you think about consumer electronics, they have high intensity of changes because you have a new phone or a new laptop every six months. And when you look at aviation, aviation is catching up in some sense because you don't have the volumes that you need to automate and also you don't talk about changes that's frequently as consumer electronics. So I think that's where the combination of AI and robotics is going to help these new industries that are trying to catch up, where they may not have enough volumes or enough need for change. And I think that's where really AI robotics is going to help the cost about not just aviation. - Yeah, it is exciting how, I mean, robotics has just dramatically accelerated in terms of the abilities. It's uptake adoption across the industry and what we can do will be potentially incorporate AI. So there's just so much that's happening. Well, as we're wrapping up, is there anything that I didn't ask you about any final thoughts that you wanted to share and please tell me it's you know what's going on with the drones over the US? (laughing) - I had the drones, drones is such an amazing thing. I feel like that's one of the things we should have spent a lot of time building that infrastructure. Maybe some of us saw that coming but I think we are in the cutting out game on the drone side. Yeah, talking about questions. No, I think we hit on everything. I would have wanted to talk about. - Have you ever flown in an electric aircraft? - No, I haven't. I've managed to put myself and then it was in a stationary position. Yes, I've been inside one, but not actually flown one. We have trained pilot that Joby, you have done this actually do it every day over a period of time. I think we will slowly start having people who are no longer trained pilots taking passengers very, very soon. - Do you think people are ready for an electric aircraft? - I think so. People are ready anything. It also starts adopting new technology. So if you think about there's always a fear factor with every new technology. If you think like you talk about aviation, the invention of flight moving people from point A to point B, now taking a flight is as synonymous to taking a car ride. That's not what we talk about, like here. I'm coming to LA. We just assume that a person is going to fly. - Yeah, yeah. - Right. And I think that time is what is going to tell, like how quickly people are going to adopt and being able to understand their market needs and hatred in them is super important because we can't just go and start throwing solution at people. It's about understanding where the problem is and addressing that problem in the solution as opposed to just giving solution to people who probably don't have a need for it. - Yeah. In my mind, I'm picturing this as flying cars because there's already electric cars. So now I'm thinking you're inventing flying cars for all of us. So, absolutely. Flying cars that can go from, you know, let's look at this one. Our strange one is moving people from San Francisco to San Jose in the area. Safety is moving people from San Francisco to LA. Phase three is we're talking about cross-country and there's probably a phase four to that is moving people, you know, between continents. That's the exciting stuff that we're working here in Chopey. - Sign me up. This is great. I'm so excited that you're doing this because traffic is a real bummer. So. - I know. (laughing) - Well, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. It's really about for anybody who wants to maybe connect with you or learn more about what you're doing and Chopey Aviation. Where would you send them? - My LinkedIn page. Yeah, it's LinkedIn.ion/chranevoss-surrage. - Great. And we'll include a link for everybody so that they can access that. And then Chopey Aviation website. - Yes, Chopey don't ever sit lean right up to what you're gonna see in a couple of months coming near you. - X-Flighting, I love it, I love it. All right. Well, Chopey Voss, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. - Thank you, Terry. It was awesome. - All right, that was Chopey Voss-surrage. Supply Chain Lead at Chopey Aviation. And to everyone listening, thank you for being a part of the future of manufacturing. - Thank you for listening to Manufacturing the Future, brought to you by Epicor. For the latest episodes, search for the show on your podcast platform of choice. - Make sure to subscribe to get notified when new episodes are released. - To learn more about Epicor, visit epicor.com.