Extra Than Manufacturing: What Being a Battery COO Actually Means

Final Up to date on: eighth August 2025, 11:34 pm

When individuals hear “COO at a battery producer,” they assume I spend my days on the manufacturing unit flooring watching manufacturing strains. Don’t get me mistaken—manufacturing is a big a part of what I do.

However the actuality? It’s far more complicated than that.

Manufacturing Excellence as Basis

Sure, we at Proterra manufacture batteries, however trendy battery manufacturing requires precision engineering at each step. By combining automation, superior manufacturing strategies, and rigorous high quality management, we produce options designed for probably the most demanding environments.

This manufacturing excellence is simply the place to begin.

Mission and Organizational Alignment

We now have a mission at Proterra to energy our clients’ zero-emission initiatives by offering progressive battery options for probably the most demanding purposes. Central to my function is making certain that each workforce member is aware of how what they do every day is contributing to delivering on that mission. This sounds easy, however it takes lots of energy and self-discipline to do it appropriately. It begins with steering our leaders in growing our transformation technique—growing our long-term objectives, our multiyear targets, and the execution plans that may take us from a producing know-how start-up to a revered automotive grade manufacturing group.

Individuals are the middle of all operations, and making certain they know they’re a part of the longer term, they know the journey that we’re on, and the way they contribute to getting us to the vacation spot is central to my management function.

Constructing Our Working Tradition

One of the rewarding points of my function is growing and evolving our working tradition. Whereas established producers have had a long time to develop their manufacturing programs, we are able to thoughtfully construct from the bottom up one thing that matches our particular mission.

I’m vastly targeted on growing, articulating, and enabling our Manufacturing System which underpins our working tradition. Individuals growth, accountability, and respect type the inspiration on which we construct downside solvers, armed with a deal with 5S, standardized work, Kaizen, and a thirst to make every day higher than the day earlier than.

Tradition constructing is tough and takes self-discipline to all the time “stroll the stroll.” Nothing makes me prouder than seeing the groups and features responding to the change and the metric needles shifting. My calling right here is to construct a tradition that outlasts any particular person or chief. We’re Proterra, we’re automotive, and higher by no means stops.

Individuals Growth: Extra Than Simply Hiring

Operations management is all about individuals. We now have a mission, we’ve a technique to ship it, however with out the best individuals and expertise we is not going to full the journey. We develop downside solvers—accountable, caring workforce members who worth Proterra’s mission and need to be a part of constructing our future.

With the help of management and HR groups we actively handle our expertise bench and pipeline, offering the best coaching and the best alternatives to permit workforce members to develop consistent with their ambitions and aligned with the wants of the group. It is a important a part of my function—constructing the best expertise and future leaders—seeing workforce members excel of their journey, whether or not at Proterra or elsewhere, is what offers me the best sense of accomplishment and is the “why” behind my management motivation.

Discovering the Proper Slot in Manufacturing

Battery manufacturing entails high-skill duties in a safety-critical surroundings with excessive voltage and heavy gear. Our coaching groups and manufacturing supervisors guarantee everybody is correctly ready earlier than they attain the manufacturing line.

Given these calls for, we put candidates by hands-on assessments to judge their precision work capabilities and allow them to expertise what the job truly entails. Somebody would possibly interview completely however discover the handbook points difficult. This method ensures the best match for everybody.

High quality Mindset and Buyer Centricity

When manufacturing at scale, it takes everybody working collectively to construct a high quality, dependable product. High quality isn’t one thing you examine for on the finish—it’s constructed into each single step of what we do. We maintain expensive what are referred to as the “three nevers”:

1. By no means settle for a defect
2. By no means produce a defect
3. By no means cross a defect

When everybody understands who their clients are and sticks to those rules, high quality will get embedded all through the entire course of as a substitute of simply being checked on the finish. The idea applies outdoors of producing additionally; I apply it throughout my complete group. Once you perceive how your exercise interacts together with your upstream and downstream stakeholders, and also you deal with making use of these three easy statements, you construct a corporation that cares in regards to the high quality of their work and places the shopper on the heart.

Manufacturing Technique: Staying Forward of Buyer and Market Demand

My manufacturing technique workforce envisions and shapes the way forward for our manufacturing capabilities. They mix new product launch plans with future buyer demand to construct our manufacturing funding roadmap. By analyzing demand forecasts with organizational efficiency enhancements, they decide the optimum timing and site for brand spanking new strains, amenities, and capability investments. They spearhead our preparation for future manufacturing wants.

Industrialization: From Design Idea to Manufacturing Execution

Our design engineers at Proterra create industry-leading battery options targeted on security and efficiency. My manufacturing engineers then translate these ideas into strong manufacturing processes and programs, making certain we produce new merchandise proper the primary time, on the proper value, and consistent with buyer high quality necessities.

They be certain that the manufacturing system, gear, and requirements work in concord to offer an environment friendly and secure end-to-end materials move and manufacturing course of. By way of our prototype and trial construct phases they deal with making certain that security, high quality, supply, and price targets are achieved by the industrialization of recent merchandise and crops and bridge the hole between design idea and manufacturing execution.

Strategic Sourcing: Constructing Provider Partnerships

Alongside manufacturing engineering, sourcing is an integral a part of my workforce. With out elements, there isn’t a manufacturing; and not using a resilient provide chain there isn’t a stability in operations; and with out value competitiveness we is not going to survive as a corporation.

Because the Proterra R&D engineering workforce designs batteries, our sourcing workforce finds provider companions that may be part of our provide ecosystem and supply the components we’d like. We work to search out suppliers who can meet our demanding efficiency and know-how necessities and companion with them from growth by long-term provide.

With geopolitical modifications unfolding recurrently, they monitor the availability chain for disruption dangers and consistently look to enhance the resilience of our end-to-end provide chain by Tier 1 all the way down to Tier N.

Manufacturing Management: Provide Chain Orchestration

The actual complexity lies past simply sourcing elements. Our complete planning course of begins with buyer supply commitments and works backward:

• Prospects anticipate supply on a selected date—that is our dedication to them
• Our groups work backwards by transport, manufacturing, and element arrival timelines
• The manufacturing management workforce manages suppliers each home and worldwide with prolonged lead instances—inserting orders to make sure manufacturing schedules are met whereas minimizing stock ranges
• They schedule manufacturing crops to reduce work-in-process and changeovers whereas sustaining the manufacturing instances required to hit buyer supply dates

Our manufacturing management workforce consistently runs situations, analyzing stock, figuring out dangers, and dealing with gross sales throughout negotiations to find out the shortest attainable supply timelines.

Security and Sustainability Operations

At Proterra, we consider cutting-edge know-how can remodel transportation’s function in constructing a extra sustainable future. My environmental well being, security, and sustainability groups hold individuals secure whereas defending the surroundings. They deal with every thing from manufacturing flooring security to our take a look at lab protocols, plus make certain we’re compliant with rules.

However it goes means past simply following guidelines. These groups handle hazardous supplies, monitor wastewater, monitor vitality utilization, and work on lowering our general environmental footprint.

How It All Comes Collectively

I lead groups throughout engineering, manufacturing operations, security, provide chain, sourcing, stock, and high quality. However the day-to-day means consistently collaborating with gross sales, R&D, finance, HR, and our govt workforce to verify our operational capabilities match up with the place we’re making an attempt to go strategically.

Essentially the most rewarding moments come when groups work collectively to unravel complicated challenges.

The Actual Affect of COO Management

Being a COO in battery manufacturing means orchestrating programs, relationships, and strategic initiatives that span means past the manufacturing unit flooring. It’s about enabling success from uncooked supplies all through to buyer supply, it’s about delivering outcomes at present whereas concurrently constructing the enterprise for the longer term, and it’s about aligning features and making certain that each workforce member feels a part of one thing significant and is aware of how they contribute.

Yeah, it contains manufacturing. However it’s a lot greater than manufacturing.

Press launch from Proterra.