Ingersoll Rand, an engineering and information technology company, is trying to keep pace with a slew of ideas, both from within and outside, to choose which one will be a success story as it tries to manage the inflow, said Paul Camuti, CTO and senior VP of Innovation.
“It is just about managing ideas... where do the ideas come from and quickly decide which ideas are the best to preserve,” Mr. Camuti said in an interview. “How to choose which ideas to work.. so how we changed as a company is a process around how to set ideas, both from within the company and outside the company, such as partnering and how quickly to choose on which ideas to accelerate to get solutions to the market.”
The Ingersoll-Sergeant Drill Company and the Rand Drill Company merged in 1905 to form Ingersoll Rand. In 2006, it completed 100 years of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Ingersoll Rand has manufacturing and assembly operations in 51 locations globally. It also maintains offices, warehouses, and repair centres around the globe. It is headquartered in Davidson, North Carolina and was incorporated as a company in Dublin, Ireland. In India, it has two engineering and technology centres at Chennai and Bengaluru.
Mr. Camuti said with the advent of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics and machine learning, the company was building in “more flexibility.”
“The biggest changes that are happening are markets and opportunities are incredibly dynamic and they are changing all the time. You have to be super flexible. Flexibility has become a sort of important thing. Then the rate of technology change is, for a 10-year or 20-year period of time every year we think can it get any faster. Can it? The next year it gets faster.
Competitive advantage
“You have a highly dynamic market, [and] super-fast change in technology. So how you manage the company changes. On one hand, we try to build in some flexibility into the company. That is the only competitive advantage that you can have. You have to have the speed and flexibility as soon as possible. On the other hand, we have to manage ideas.” “It is a much more agile approach to managing these ideas. Typically we want to analyse and plan for lengthy periods of time until we mature and right now we have to cut that cycle time. Being twice is not good enough and we have to be faster than that,” Mr. Camuti said.
The Bengaluru and Chennai centres are part of the global engineering centres which support the industrial, climatic and cold-chain segments of the company.
“India plays a key role for us across the company, supporting all three legs of the company. There are about 11 businesses in those three legs. There is a lot of diversity in our industrial businesses, the main business there is industrial air compressors. We also have power tools and material handling. We have some business for electric vehicles, not too active in India but globally. The cold chain business is really a transportation, refrigeration and HPAC business.
“We are not only involved with small trucks, large trucks and last mile delivery trucks, but also air freight and train and transit bus and then air conditioning business to small residential to the large suppliers of industrial applications. So there is a lot. The engineering and technology team here in one form or fashion touches every piece of business,” he said.
