Ather Energy, who is soon nearing the launch of its first product, has been working on productisation challenges. The Bangalore-based company has hired many automobile supply chain and sales professionals as it nears the manufacturing and commercialisation phase.
Productisation is the act of modifying something, such as a concept or a tool internal to an organization, to make it suitable as a commercial product. Tarun Mehta, Co-founder of Ather was quoted saying, "We can't ship a product as a start-up. From a system perspective, we have to be a very mature company. Recalls can be very expensive for us. We want to reduce chances of that to as close to zero as possible."
The company was expected to commercialise the electric scooter by mid-2016. The scooter, it was going to come out with, is the S340. The concept featured a lithium ion battery pack with a range up to 60km and a top speed of 72kmph. It takes 1 hour to achieve 80 per cent charge using the fast charging mode. The electric scooter’s battery pack claims a life cycle of 50,000km and a life span of 5 to 6 years.
Mehta added, "There are still many productisation challenges (those related to cost, packaging, manufacturability, integration). We realized this later. Hence the delay. We reworked the timelines and got all these new people."
Some of these new hirings include Dr Sreeram, who has about 18 years of experience in creating processes and systems in companies including GE, Caterpillar and Maersk. And Rajaram Swaminathan, who was with Bloom Energy, Moser Baer, HP and Intel.
Commenting on the new hirings, Mehta was quoted saying, "We have a lot to learn from places like Germany and Silicon Valley, and these people we have hired have that experience. We also have to get to a stage where we can sell a million units a year. We will look at next round of funding once we start deliveries. At that point we would need to spend on sales, marketing, customer experience and will need to start thinking of expanding the plant."
Source - ETAuto
