Interview | Kishore Jayaraman, President, Rolls-Royce India & South Asia

This has been an unusual year. How did Rolls-Royce adapt to new realities dictated by the COVID-19 pandemic?

This year was indeed unusual and challenging. The impact of the coronavirus was felt across nations, sectors, and businesses. However, the pandemic also brought forth our strength as a nation and as a people. We salute the brave officers of the Indian armed forces for their contribution in providing vital support to communities during these challenging times even as they continue to bravely secure our borders. At Rolls-Royce, it has been our endeavor to ensure consistent support to the forces through this time. Our field service representatives have been constantly supporting Indian air force personnel to maximise the availability of engines on wings and provide on-ground technical advice directly to our customers, thereby drastically reducing maintenance and overhaul times. Our Defence Service Delivery Centre in Bengaluru is the only one in Asia that is specifically at the service of the Indian armed forces and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). The centre is aimed at constantly improving Rolls-Royce’s responsiveness to the customer, thus enabling the customer to further improve engine availability.

Rolls-Royce’s MTU engines propel and power several vessels of both navy and Coast Guard. Our teams, stationed at several locations along the Indian coastline, have been providing high levels of service and support to ensure optimal performance and functionality of all our engines through these times. Given travel restrictions at various locations due to the pandemic, we often worked virtually with available resources on-ground to resolve service requests and deliver consistent functionality of the vessel.

Globally, our facilities are operating with stringent distancing norms keeping our production lines moving, and our support teams continue to assist armed forces as well as airline customers around the world. We have also strengthened our technology infrastructure even as our people have adopted and adapted to new, digital ways of working.

Another key development is that Rolls-Royce has collaborated with leading companies to form Emer2gent, a new global alliance of data analytics experts challenged with finding new, faster ways of supporting businesses and governments with data-led insights to help accelerate economic recovery. Emer2gent will combine traditional economic, business, travel and retail data sets with behaviour and sentiment data, to provide new insights and practical applications to support the global recovery from COVID-19.

Our teams at R² Data Labs have also been working to create an Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework called The Aletheia Framework™ to make the application of AI ethical and trustworthy.

A new, widely accepted normal emerged from this crisis, and in fact gave us an extraordinary opportunity to make it a better normal by becoming more agile, humane, creative and self-reliant.

Did the pandemic affect your ongoing programmes in India? What has been the progress on those?

This pandemic has tested the adaptability of businesses to sustain into the future. The health and safety of our people has been and remains our top priority through this time. The initial period of nation-wide lockdowns due to the pandemic temporarily affected our operations and those of our partners. However, we soon bounced back from the effects of the pandemic to find ways to first and foremost resume support for all our engines and assets in service with the armed forces.

We have helped enable a strong ecosystem for aerospace and defence manufacturing in the country and have continued to work with our supply chain partners to ensure consistent delivery to the global supply chain ecosystem. We have also been working closely with our joint ventures—International Aerospace Manufacturing Pvt Ltd. (IAMPL) and Force MTU Power Systems to ensure continuity during this time.

Rolls-Royce operates in a highly technology-intensive industry and innovation is at the heart of all we do