DETROIT — Since he was a child, Shilpan Amin saw the value of an entrepreneurial approach. At General Motors, he aims to take that mindset to scale.
Amin, GM’s new 44-year-old purchasing chief, wants to play a role in bringing an innovative spirit to a company that’s been churning out cars for more than a century. Improving communication among engineers, the purchasing team and GM’s suppliers is one of Amin’s primary goals. He counts his supplier-relations savvy as one of the factors that propelled GM’s battery-making joint venture with LG Chem.
Amin, who was in the 2016 class of Automotive News Rising Stars, succeeded Steve Kiefer as vice president for purchasing and supply chain in November. Kiefer now heads GM South America and the automaker’s International Operations division.
Amin’s father, an immigrant from India, was a chemical engineer in Ford Motor Co.’s glass division before starting a small business.
“This is where the entrepreneurial mindset came in for me,” Amin told Automotive News. His father acquired struggling businesses and turned them around. For example, when Ford shifted to a more casual dress code and local dry cleaners lost business in the 1970s and early ’80s, Amin’s father bought five of those cleaners to create a “hub-and-spoke” network, Amin said. He applied the concept across other industries as well.
Amin learned from his father that “the traditional ways of running a business aren’t necessarily what’s going to sustain you in the future,” he said in an interview at GM’s engineering center in Warren, Mich.
In 2001, after four years as a GM engineer, Amin went to the University of Southern California to earn a master’s degree in entrepreneurship in the midst of the dot-com era.
“It felt like the West Coast was doing something different than what the Midwest was doing,” he said. He enrolled in the program to gain perspective on how the broader automotive industry worked and learn innovative approaches to business issues. “The whole time I kept thinking … that entrepreneurial mindset can work in a large organization,” Amin said.
He returned to GM with that entrepreneurial approach in mind. Since then, he has focused on connecting engineering with purchasing and the supply chain. Amin has spent about half his career in engineering and half in purchasing. He found that both groups were trying to do what’s right for GM but effectively spoke different languages.
Today, Amin is proud of the way GM has bridged that divide through collaboration.
“It’s not just product innovation, which we do a great job of bringing into our vehicles, but it’s process innovation, people innovation,” he said. GM can leverage “not just our core capabilities, but our suppliers’ core capabilities. So together we find solutions for our customers beyond what anyone else can.”
Amin has taken his approach to experiments extending beyond automotive.
When he went into GM’s Global Propulsion Systems division in 2017, he aimed to inject his business perspective and help incubate new ideas. He and his team created an engineering venture-capital group.
“And it was really when this concept of the entrepreneurial mindset in the corporate world really came to light, that it can be done, it can be effective,” he said. “We can really drive innovation and be successful at doing that. And so we really fostered a couple of strong ideas that are still ongoing out there.”
One example stretched his expertise to the marine industry. Amin and his team explored the pain points of electrification in the boating world vs. automotive. Boats are noisy, and boaters don’t have easy access to fuel or want to carry five-gallon tanks to fill at gas stations.
For recreational activities, he explained, “you want to have a peaceful conversation with those that are around you,” which is difficult when passengers can’t hear each other over the engine. Then when boaters get hungry, they have to dock and disembark, he said.
So his team created an electric pontoon concept using electric vehicle technology to make boating more convenient and displayed the concept at the 2018 Miami Boat Show.
“Now you bring with that much power on the boat things like TV to the boat, refrigerators to the boat, electric grills to the boat. Your kids can still play on their iPads and be plugged in at the boat,” he said. “It’s nearly zero noise, zero emissions. It meets the needs of that consumer base better than the experiences they have today.”
Amin says mentors within GM, global human resources chief Kim Brycz among them, have shaped his leadership style.
Amin was apprehensive about moving from engineering to purchasing in 2007. He was an engineer by trade, but one of Amin’s managers encouraged him to talk with Brycz before rejecting the offer.
The manager had just rotated back to engineering from a purchasing assignment and shared how eye-opening the experience was. The skills gained in purchasing would make Amin a better engineer and improve the engineering team as a whole, he said.
After Amin talked with Brycz, who was a global purchasing and supply chain leader at the time, he agreed to do it.
“It’s about leadership. What she brought to the table and her leadership style really [made me want to] work for her and learn from her,” Amin said.
Brycz tasked Amin with stretch assignments but assured him that she was there for support.
Amin spent most of the next decade on that side of the business. After visits with suppliers, he often returns with a list of suggestions to improve quality, durability and warranty costs through collaboration.
“It’s bringing in those cross-functional teams together to have a dialogue and bringing those insights together to help connect the dots,” Amin said.
In December, GM and LG Chem, a South Korean battery maker, announced a combined $2.3 billion investment to mass-produce battery cells in northeastern Ohio, near GM’s former Lordstown Assembly plant.
The relationship that GM’s purchasing and supply chain team established with LG “built a partnership that we’re both invested into,” Amin said.
“You see that across the suppliers, the ability for our suppliers to engage with us early — be a part of our solutions. We joke with some of our suppliers that we often have to look at the badge because sometimes they’re just as strong of a voice within GM as a GM employee. They’re just as passionate about us jointly winning and that engagement is fulfilling for them because they act as one team.”
The commitment is clear during work stoppages or crises that affect suppliers, and Amin has been through many: a tsunami in Japan, a flood in Pennsylvania and last year’s UAW strike, for example.
“The amount of teamwork that occurs … during that time frame continues to be a benchmark of how we run,” he said.
“We use that crisis mentality as a lesson learned of how we should work as one organization and with the supply base. At the end of the day, it always benefits the total industry and our customers.”