Digitizing a manufacturing giant
Revathi Advaithi, CEO, Flex
Revathi Advaithi is the CEO of the $ 24-billion Flex, a rare example of a non-white woman leading an electronics manufacturing behemoth. “I’m an Indian woman in an industrial environment in the US, which is not an easy place,” she said.
She noticed how difficult it was for women even in a sector like tech. But he is on the manufacturing shop floor in the US midwest. Crucial to his success is his flexibility in different cultures. “Wherever you go in the world, it’s important for you to spend time learning about that culture and be an integral part of that culture,” he said.
The mechanical engineer from BITS Pilani moved to Flex three years ago, after 10 years at power management company Eaton. Revathi is president and COO for its business in the electricity sector. Now, he’s moving Flex into the new era of digital manufacturing. Flex has 160,000 employees in more than 100 facilities in approximately 30 countries, and its portfolio covers consumer devices, automotive, healthcare, communications, industrial and cloud.
A pandemic is a watershed. Revathi said it helped break down the boundaries inside and outside the shop floor. Flex needed to quickly pivot to digital technologies including simulating a manufacturing line. “How do you input data into the simulated line, and make assumptions on how the line will work, and do all that remotely before you start that line itself!” he says. All of its 100+ sites are enabled for virtual tours and simulations. “So we can ramp up the ventilators and qualify it previously as a 1-2-year cycle. But we got up and running with a new line of ventilators in 2-3 months,” Revathi said.
I am a big fan of mentorship
Women make up 44% of Flex’s global workforce. On the board, the figure is 27%. Flex, Revathi says, is focused on metrics. “You will only have a result if you measure it. My teams closely monitor variation numbers. We’re actively following that to see how we can improve that pipeline, how we can improve promotion rates, how to open up jobs for more minorities and women, ”she said. Mentorship and sponsorship, she said, is important in the process.
Jayashree Ullal: Takes revenue from $ 0 to $ 3 billion
Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO, Arista
Jayshree Ullal has had an amazing career. She is among Newsweek’s 20 powerful `Women to watch in 2001’. That was in the middle of his 15-year tenure at Cisco. In 2008, he took over as president and CEO of a budding networking startup called Arista Networks. In the 14 years since then, Arista has grown into a $ 3 billion revenue company, with a market cap of $ 35 billion. In 2021, sales jumped 27%. Jayshree, a Tamilian who grew up in Delhi and then moved to the US, led the company to a great IPO in 2014, one that also created millionaires among its employees in India, where Arista has major R&D. center.
Jayshree said the company strongly believes in its culture and values, which it calls “Arista’s Way.” It is centered, he says, on always doing the right thing for customers, employees and shareholders. “I am proud that Arista has upheld these principles in the face of uncertainty and global changes around the world,” he said.
Arista’s cloud networking products and services are mission critical to key global infrastructures. Jayshree said the advent of real-time gaming, virtual reality and all so-called metaverse applications is changing the way networks and workloads interact. This new data-driven cloud network, he said, needs to adapt for 10-100 times the traffic growth, enabling trillions of transactions and gigabits of throughput. “AI is becoming more relevant to networking as distributed applications drive the envelope of network scale and performance. We’ve teamed up with Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat, Equinix, Palo Alto, ServiceNow, Slack, Splunk, ZScaler and Zoom to build a collaborative ecosystem, ”he said.
Gender diversity is a journey
Gender diversity, Jayshree says, is a journey, not a definite milestone. More than 30% of Arista’s board of directors and senior leadership are women. “While we still have a long way to go in increasing the number of women in the technical and engineering fields of high tech companies, we are making slow and steady progress. In this journey, we identify and cultivate women and men leaders based on their potential, merit and results. We also make informal alliances with female leaders in Fortune 500 companies, ”Jayshree said.
– Shilpa Phadnis, Kruthikaa LakshmanAkhil George |
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