Amit Mohanty - Team Leader in Connectivity Analytics
Amit Mohanty combines insight and behavior to help Ford drive innovation
Amit Mohanty combines insight and behavior to help Ford drive innovation
For Amit Mohanty, a first-generation Indian, nothing is more important than family and community. Luckily, he’s found both at Ford and in Dearborn through his position as a team leader in Global Data Insight and Analytics (GDI&A). “We have a large Indian community here,” he says. “We do a lot of activities I couldn’t possibly do in some other parts of the United States, such as playing cricket, and downtown Detroit is a nice, culturally rich place.”
Amit’s journey to his career at Ford was not a conventional one. After graduating from Purdue with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, he joined the Department of Energy as a staff scientist but still harbored a deep interest in the automotive industry. He followed some Ford leaders on Twitter and began to tweet with a director of the GDI&A department about current trends in the transportation industry. Shortly thereafter, Amit was invited to interview on the team, and the rest is history.
“We are on the cusp of a tectonic shift in the transportation industry. It’s almost like a big bang moment. And I think as Ford makes the journey from being an automotive company to an automotive as well as a mobility company, it presents a lot of challenges as well as opportunities for me to grow and contribute professionally and to affect people’s lives immediately.”
Amit immediately took a liking to Ford not only because of its family-oriented culture and location, but also because of the impact he can have on the transportation world as a whole. The team he leads at GDI&A helps Ford make evidence-based decisions by delivering forward-thinking, actionable insights from the massive amounts of data that Ford collects.
“We are on the cusp of a tectonic shift in the transportation industry,” he says. "It’s almost like a big bang moment. And I think as Ford makes the journey from being an automotive company to an automotive as well as a mobility company, it presents a lot of challenges as well as opportunities for me to grow and contribute professionally, and to affect people’s lives immediately.”
A large part of Amit and GDI&A’s goals are to help Ford drive behavior in the transportation industry. He uses the insights they collect from vehicle performance data to see how Ford customers use their vehicles in a variety of conditions to ultimately better serve the customers. To best achieve this, Amit subscribes to the concept of One Ford, where different disciplines collaborate to provide synergy around specific goals.
“One Ford is our creed,” he says. “It encourages singular focus, teamwork, collaboration and a global approach to problem-solving around a common definition of success. I think it’s very important for the kind of work we do. We touch all the departments, all the organizations inside Ford to generate that insight, from which we can make evidence-based decisions. And I think it’s very critical to our success."