What does it mean to you to be a PMP?
A PMP needs to be a "jack of all trades" to interact and bring synergies between various internal and external stakeholders, like operations, quality, engineering, the purchasing leadership team, finance and supply partners.
A PMP is the main interface between the purchasing organization and the project team. Our role is to understand the business needs of a project and align our sourcing capabilities to meet the demands in terms of supply partners, manufacturing technology and resources.
What type of electromobility projects do you and your colleagues work on?
I belong to the BEV (battery electric vehicle) Project Office in SNR&PM (Supply Network Resilience & Project Management). We focus on Heavy Duty (HD) BEVs, which supports Volvo Group's electrification strategy.
How did you end up in the project management field?
I actually started my career as a buyer in the motorcycle industry in India for both traditional OEMs and dynamic startups. As a buyer, I learned a lot about the manufacturing industry and automotive sourcing. I was particularly interested in testing and validation, and I got an opportunity to work in product builds for test rigs and trucks at Volvo Group India. This gave me a good understanding of the engineering perspective.
Working within purchasing and product builds, I saw myself enjoying the project management elements more and the PMP role brings both these worlds together. To gain a deeper understanding of project management as a career, I also got my PMP certification.
Tell us about a typical day at work.
No two days looks the same! Sometimes it feels like I am in the movie Inception as I try to navigate everyone's dreams!
All the stakeholders have their views and as a representative from Purchasing in different fora, I aim to enable collaboration between cross-functional teams to steer solutions toward more resilient and sustainable sourcing.
What is the best part of your job?
You never get bored being a PMP. There are new challenges every day and I really like that. The networking is amazing and there are great opportunities to have a holistic view of our future projects within Volvo Group Purchasing.
What are your long-term goals?
A dream would be to try to improve the IT landscape for project management - imagine if all our tools and systems could communicate and we could have one source of data!
I’d love to be a part of making new technology available too. If we lack infrastructure for charging.
