Arungalai Anbarasu: Delivering Breakthrough Technology and Digital Transformation
Journey and Inspiration As a child, the curiosity of questions like where we came from, how things are built, how the earth was formed among others kept Arungalai Anbarasu awake at night. This made her want to be an astronaut. However, she grew up not knowing that her poor eye vision would never let her pursue that path. Therefore, she went to study the closest thing to it, engineering. She has her master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Science. And her master thesis was on Non-Destructive Testing (NDT), that’s what her employer Waygate Technologies specializes in. After university, she joined the famous conglomerate General Electric (GE) into their graduate program called Edison engineering where she learned how technology is used to build and sell solutions that solve different problems in the world like energy, healthcare, transportation, and communication. Therefore, driving a strategy & business from wing to wing became a passion which made her take different roles in GE & Baker Hughes in the areas of finance, strategy, operations, technology, and business leadership up to her current role of Chief Technology & Strategy Officer for Waygate Technologies, a Baker Hughes business. She and her team look at the overarching strategy for Waygate Technologies while delivering breakthrough technology innovation and digital transformation. She also led the industrial X-ray and computed tomography (CT) business in the past few years at Baker Hughes (BH). Every role, every experience, every country Arungalai has lived, taught her something new and contributed to shaping her career and personality. The diversity of roles and global nature of her roles before has really helped her look at the strategy for the company in a very balanced yet with an exponential growth approach. Her experiences have also taught her the power of being able to flex from the strategic view to the tactical view to operate the business at best which she very much leverages in her current role. Not only to dream about the future but also to enable the operations to make it real! Opportunities Against Difficulties As with any company in this age – COVID has thrown at Waygate Technologies a really large wrench. Its key customers were impacted, and that is clearly affecting them – it does no one good to ignore that fact. “There are opportunities even in the difficult moments.” With that in view, COVID has also posed a positive aspect where the digital transformation is accelerating in every industry…It is the new beginning for the Digital Revolution! NDE4.0 in Waygate Technologies’ case. Overall, if anything good has come out of COVID, it is the fact that drove us further away from each other physically and brought a lot of people much closer together virtually. The manifestation of this in industrial inspection is the drive to data and the drive to a larger level of, remote, collaboration. This coincidentally is precisely what is enabled by the suite of Waygate Technologies’ digital products called InspectionWorks. What are the main challenges to achieving the transformation from a device-centric inspection company to a data-centric inspection company? – both internally and externally? Transformation exists throughout the process; not just technology. Sometimes, digital transformation is seen as a technology problem only. Waygate Technologies is a company with a great heritage – the team traces its lineage back to Krautkrämer and Seifert – people who discovered the technologies and invented the techniques. However, with this heritage also comes a lot of tradition that tends to get up-ended in this world of, quite literally, data-driven micro-second decisions (if you don’t believe in the time scale, just look at the micro traders on Wall Street). ‘Waygatians’ try to address these challenges along with multiple fronts: Move execution to focus explicitly on collaborative partnerships – with customers and partners – this is critical because all these software solutions can become most successful when the team works in close collaboration with customers and partners, and focus exclusively on areas where they can deliver the most value – this allows for scale in a world that is moving at warp speed. The second pillar is that of building the right commercial models – they are so used to selling boxes that even when they sell software, they end up selling it as if they are selling a box – they need to consciously create new ways of doing business – this means trying out new models, refining them and coming up with faster, and more efficient paths to revenue. They need to continue to look long and hard at how to enable sales and commercial success on software and solutions – this requires a completely different mindset that needs to be encouraged, by training, incentives, etc. Finally from a hardware and machine manufacturing business to a software solutions business is a hard shift on technology execution and rhythms – one example is that they are moving to a constant release rhythm – they have set up a quarterly release calendar and they would like to drive a steady expectation from their customers – where like any other major software company’s yearly release event – their customers look to them at certain times of the year for them to release new versions of their solutions – like clock-work. Women Softening Economy Making decisions after considering multiple viewpoints ensures the probability of success from the outcomes is higher & the probability of approach with balanced emotions is higher. Women bring unique perspectives to research and scientific conversation, reduce the skill gap, and foster economic growth. Focusing on Digitalization Arungalai Anbarasu, the Chief Technology & Strategy Officer at Waygate Technologies, is driving strategy & innovation for the company. In addition to pushing the technology & business models boundaries on industrial inspection solutions, Aru and her team are also focused on the digital transformation of Waygate Technologies and the spearheads of the firm’s evolution into a Digital Inspection Solutions (DIS) provider, taking customers from inspections to insights and from insights to innovations. The key enablers that
Arungalai Anbarasu: Delivering Breakthrough Technology and Digital Transformation
Journey and Inspiration As a child, the curiosity of questions like where we came from, how things are built, how the earth was formed among others kept Arungalai Anbarasu awake at night. This made her want to be an astronaut. However, she grew up not knowing that her poor eye vision would never let her pursue that path. Therefore, she went to study the closest thing to it, engineering. She has her master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Science. And her master thesis was on Non-Destructive Testing (NDT), that’s what her employer Waygate Technologies specializes in. After university, she joined the famous conglomerate General Electric (GE) into their graduate program called Edison engineering where she learned how technology is used to build and sell solutions that solve different problems in the world like energy, healthcare, transportation, and communication. Therefore, driving a strategy & business from wing to wing became a passion which made her take different roles in GE & Baker Hughes in the areas of finance, strategy, operations, technology, and business leadership up to her current role of Chief Technology & Strategy Officer for Waygate Technologies, a Baker Hughes business. She and her team look at the overarching strategy for Waygate Technologies while delivering breakthrough technology innovation and digital transformation. She also led the industrial X-ray and computed tomography (CT) business in the past few years at Baker Hughes (BH). Every role, every experience, every country Arungalai has lived, taught her something new and contributed to shaping her career and personality. The diversity of roles and global nature of her roles before has really helped her look at the strategy for the company in a very balanced yet with an exponential growth approach. Her experiences have also taught her the power of being able to flex from the strategic view to the tactical view to operate the business at best which she very much leverages in her current role. Not only to dream about the future but also to enable the operations to make it real! Opportunities Against Difficulties As with any company in this age – COVID has thrown at Waygate Technologies a really large wrench. Its key customers were impacted, and that is clearly affecting them – it does no one good to ignore that fact. “There are opportunities even in the difficult moments.” With that in view, COVID has also posed a positive aspect where the digital transformation is accelerating in every industry…It is the new beginning for the Digital Revolution! NDE4.0 in Waygate Technologies’ case. Overall, if anything good has come out of COVID, it is the fact that drove us further away from each other physically and brought a lot of people much closer together virtually. The manifestation of this in industrial inspection is the drive to data and the drive to a larger level of, remote, collaboration. This coincidentally is precisely what is enabled by the suite of Waygate Technologies’ digital products called InspectionWorks. What are the main challenges to achieving the transformation from a device-centric inspection company to a data-centric inspection company? – both internally and externally? Transformation exists throughout the process; not just technology. Sometimes, digital transformation is seen as a technology problem only. Waygate Technologies is a company with a great heritage – the team traces its lineage back to Krautkrämer and Seifert – people who discovered the technologies and invented the techniques. However, with this heritage also comes a lot of tradition that tends to get up-ended in this world of, quite literally, data-driven micro-second decisions (if you don’t believe in the time scale, just look at the micro traders on Wall Street). ‘Waygatians’ try to address these challenges along with multiple fronts: Move execution to focus explicitly on collaborative partnerships – with customers and partners – this is critical because all these software solutions can become most successful when the team works in close collaboration with customers and partners, and focus exclusively on areas where they can deliver the most value – this allows for scale in a world that is moving at warp speed. The second pillar is that of building the right commercial models – they are so used to selling boxes that even when they sell software, they end up selling it as if they are selling a box – they need to consciously create new ways of doing business – this means trying out new models, refining them and coming up with faster, and more efficient paths to revenue. They need to continue to look long and hard at how to enable sales and commercial success on software and solutions – this requires a completely different mindset that needs to be encouraged, by training, incentives, etc. Finally from a hardware and machine manufacturing business to a software solutions business is a hard shift on technology execution and rhythms – one example is that they are moving to a constant release rhythm – they have set up a quarterly release calendar and they would like to drive a steady expectation from their customers – where like any other major software company’s yearly release event – their customers look to them at certain times of the year for them to release new versions of their solutions – like clock-work. Women Softening Economy Making decisions after considering multiple viewpoints ensures the probability of success from the outcomes is higher & the probability of approach with balanced emotions is higher. Women bring unique perspectives to research and scientific conversation, reduce the skill gap, and foster economic growth. Focusing on Digitalization Arungalai Anbarasu, the Chief Technology & Strategy Officer at Waygate Technologies, is driving strategy & innovation for the company. In addition to pushing the technology & business models boundaries on industrial inspection solutions, Aru and her team are also focused on the digital transformation of Waygate Technologies and the spearheads of the firm’s evolution into a Digital Inspection Solutions (DIS) provider, taking customers from inspections to insights and from insights to innovations. The key enablers that