Using Creativity and Curiosity to Connect the Dots
“Creativity is just connecting things”. This Steve Jobs quote pretty much sums up Arun Ramachandran’s life and career inspiration. “Life is too mysterious and too short to not get curious, learn, and dabble in just about anything and everything”, he quips. Fueled by several interests, and many more passions, Arun seeks and revels in opportunities to learn new things, form new experiences, and connect ideas when it matters to solve complex problems.
Arun built mobile robots for competitions during college, studied human movement biomechanics, dynamics, and control systems in grad school at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign, and “almost” pursued a PhD in sports science in Western Australia. He then nurtured his love for the movies by learning how to write feature film screenplays at University of California Los Angeles, got an MBA from the University of California San Diego specializing in finance, business analytics, and entrepreneurship, and attempted launching an IoT-based technology startup to disrupt restaurant food safety compliance. All this while working as an aerospace engineer in Collins Aerospace. Quite the bagful of dots to connect!
Arun’s 14-year experience at Collins Aerospace was equally diverse, ranging from technical customer support in the aftermarket & spares business, to establishing and leading large global product development teams on new airplane programs, and developing technology and sustainability strategies for the advanced aerostructures business.
In 2018, tasked with leading the Research & Technology group to identify, mature, and industrialize business critical AM technologies, Arun faced a monumental challenge – deliver a production-ready AM solution within a year for a low-rate airplane program that needed a large and complex metal aerostructure that could not be manufactured via traditional methods. Even though AM was identified as the solution, “it still had to buy its way to the airplane”, Arun recalls being told during a Program review. The significant amount of non-recurring investment required from the Program to redesign, develop specifications, generate material allowables, certify the part, and qualify a supply chain from powder to part, just for this one application, threatened to de-rail the business case at every turn.
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Quickly realizing there was no economies of scale to leverage in a low-rate program, Arun connected a dot from his MBA - create economies of scope. He identified part candidates from other Programs that could be made using the same AM technology so the upfront costs could be amortized across multiple Programs. He restructured the material allowables program from being part-specific to one that could cover a large family of parts. He also brought in several candidate AM contract manufacturers within the supply chain to produce test coupons such that the same test data was used to both generate material allowables, as well as qualify the manufacturers, thereby broadening the supply pool. The result – one of the largest structural metal AM applications qualified and certified for flight airworthiness in the A&D industry.
“Many companies start their AM journey by attempting to implement the technology on a single pathfinder application, only to abandon or retain a negative perception of the technology because of the significant investments needed to certify and qualify that one application. So, you often need to think longer term and strategize around more than one application to justify the investment, even if they are not all pursued at the same time. AM economics is also better at low volume, high mix applications.”
When Arun joined TBGA in 2022, he was immediately brought into a program that sought to close workforce skills gaps for the US Defense Industrial Base. A few meetings into the program, Arun observed that, to mobilize a regional ecosystem and develop interventions that could help close the skills gap, the value proposition of manufacturing as an attractive career path first needed to be sold to the current and future workforce in the region. “The key stakeholders from the region’s industry, academia, and communities need to come together like a startup company, craft a value proposition, create a communications strategy, and validate a sustainable business model around investments the Government wants to make in the region”. Deriving inspiration from the lean startup methodology and the business model canvas, Arun created the TBGA Workforce Regionalization Canvas to help strategize workforce development efforts in a region. This has become the foundational tool upon which all TBGA’s subsequent workforce development efforts and regionalization playbooks are modeled.
It is this entrepreneurial, creative, and curious mindset that Arun brings daily to TBGA in tackling problems in areas ranging from workforce development to sustainability, and AI.