Volta Trucks

Founded during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Volta Trucks set out to create an EV truck focused on last-mile logistics – aiming to improve the health and safety of cities and the people in them along the way. Production commenced in early 2023, but towards the end of the year the company filed for administration protection before being acquired by Luxor Capital Group. Since then, Volta Trucks has embarked on a journey of rebuilding its teams and operations, eager to take the lessons learned from this experience and begin the process of reinvigorating the business.

Reflecting on these lessons today are Shiv Tailor, Vice President of Enterprise Technology, and Fraser McBeth, Procurement Director at Volta Trucks. Both Shiv and Fraser place particular emphasis on the importance of technological innovation, relationship-building within their teams and the overall supply chain, and how the partnerships they have built are propelling the business forward.

Shiv emphasises that his current priorities lie in enabling customer and supplier experiences through technology – an instrumental task in the process of re-energising the company.

“In the Volta Trucks rebuild, we’ve been looking a lot at emerging technologies,” says Shiv. “Artificial intelligence has been a huge trend across all industries, and while you can say it’s just hype, AI can provide a lot of value to a business. So the question I’m asking is: how do we get into a good place over the next 12 months to enable AI to be effective, adding value to our customer, employee and supplier experience? That’s the key journey we look at whenever we talk about involving a new technology.”

As the company rebuilds, Fraser has been re-examining how Volta Trucks works with suppliers – preparing for the challenges of returning to production and getting ready to have customer vehicles out on the road later this year.

For Fraser, this is all about employing new strategies to be more effective within the supply chain. Within this, positioning Volta Trucks as an attractive customer to suppliers has been a top priority.

“We wanted to work with the best organisations to deliver the best products,” says Fraser. “Coming into it, we knew we didn’t have the same level of financial clout as established vehicle manufacturers and, on a surface level, that we would be viewed as a less attractive prospect than working with someone who can guarantee a hundred thousand vehicles a year.

“I had previously sat on the other side of the table, and I understand the frustrations of suppliers wanting to work in a new way with more established companies. A lot of supply chain executives want to grow and develop their business, but sometimes to them, it feels like all customers are interested in is cost. That’s how we tried to differentiate our approach – we built relationships with suppliers where we could work together and tried to make ourselves a customer who was easy to work with. That was our key strategy for finding like-minded organisations who wanted to sustain a relationship.

“For us, it’s all about managing our teams’ expertise and unique abilities to deliver a product. Rather than saying ‘We’ve got this team, this is how we want something to be run,’ we like to work in a more collaborative way throughout the entire supply chain network. We wanted to avoid falling into the obscurity of normality, and we believe we’ve been able to do that within this organisation – finding new ways of working with both customers and suppliers alike.”

Here, Shiv jumps in to emphasise how technology and data are helping to differentiate Volta Trucks as a partner of choice.

“The beauty of the Volta Trucks’ supply chain is that it’s connected at many data points, so we can understand specific details on how a component is interacting with a wider system,” explains Shiv. “What that means is that we have a greater ability to understand the downstream impacts of the supply chain, which helps us optimise the overarching network. We have enabled an automated process using our tech stack in the sales and manufacturing pipelines, which means that our suppliers receive much greater demand visibility.

“We’ve got the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process completely connected throughout the supply chain. A lot of our previous modelling relied on people, but now we’re prioritising an emphasis on using AI and machine learning to make things more efficient and automate workflows. With this in place, we want to better enable our suppliers so that they can easily do what they need to do across the supply chain.”

While Volta Trucks has re-developed its approach to supply chain modelling in the past few months, its efficient and streamlined approach has been in place from the beginning.

“Initially, our approach prioritised speed to market,” says Fraser. “You don’t have the luxury of time if you want to break into the commercial vehicle market as a newcomer. So we were trying to find products that already existed, with real-world experience of being used in commercial vehicles, which helped us keep development costs down and focus our investment on trying to build the product itself.

“We felt that this gave us a stronger standing in the market, as we were taking products that were also used by our competitors and had been proven to be effective, rather than trying to build everything from scratch.

“However, because of this, we needed suppliers who were able to accommodate a more challenging timescale. A key supplier who has been instrumental in this process is Lander. Their engineering expertise and flexibility have been invaluable, especially in the early phases of prototype building. They have the ability to build products quickly in-house, piecing together what needs to be done to make the vehicle function and help us provide a solution.”

According to Fraser, what made Volta Trucks stand out to the strategic suppliers it targeted in the early stages of development was the company’s commitment to building relationships.

“A key facet of supplier relationships is transparency,” says Fraser. “We’ve always taken supplier feedback on board – what we do well, and importantly what we could do better. You can’t discount the value of one-on-one relationships with a supplier, especially in a post-COVID-19 world.

“Accelera has been an example of a great partner to work with through the whole project and have continued to be extremely supportive through the challenges of last year. We’ve been able to build strong relationships across their business and the focus and attention they’ve given us as a customer has helped us secure access to new technologies and opportunities in fresh markets.

“We’ve put a huge amount of time, energy and resources into building these relationships, including physically going to the suppliers’ plants. This has helped us better understand their strengths, as well as any challenges or pain points they may have as our business grows that we can work on together. When we get to that one-on-one level, we want to make sure that it’s not all about us. We want to look at our suppliers’ operations, and see what we can learn from them.”

Shiv and Fraser insist having a strong relationship with suppliers is particularly important when trying to disrupt the status quo as a business, particularly in the automotive and commercial vehicle industries.

“Cost has to be an important factor when we talk about being a sustainable business,” says Fraser. “Not only do we need to be sustainable, but the overall market needs to become more competitive. With alternative fuel products like electric vehicles, it’s the end customers who are ultimately paying more money. But we all need to find ways to bring more benefits into our supply chain to make it more accessible for the customer. And we couldn’t do that without our existing partnerships.”

Shiv echoes this sentiment from a technological perspective.

“I would like to add that culture is not more important than the quality or the capability of our partners,” says Shiv. “But when you’re working in such an adaptive world, you need to make sure that you have partners who are aligned with your vision.

“We didn’t necessarily get this right at the start, but we corrected quickly. Now, we have a set of suppliers who understand how the business is changing and what we’re trying to achieve, and I would argue that our relationship has become a true partnership at this point. These partnerships are very intuitive – you know when you’ve got it right incredibly quickly.”

However, while Volta Trucks has built close relationships with its suppliers, bringing together components from a range of suppliers to create a cohesive product can be challenging. Fraser celebrates how the high-quality partnerships the company has built up have made this process more streamlined.

“From the beginning, we’ve tried to work with suppliers who can be fast and agile,” says Fraser. “And we’ve done our best to work closely with those suppliers, especially on an engineering front. As every supplier has different standard parts, it can become challenging to fit these components together without significant changes for all parties.

“A great example of a supplier we’ve been able to work effectively with is Hendrickson. We’ve used their expertise in the truck market to try and facilitate high-quality products at speed, supporting some really challenging timescales on safety critical components. They’ve been incredibly supportive from the outset, all the way through the process of bankruptcy, to today – this support gives us the confidence to restart with a new, exciting project.”

As Shiv and Fraser look to the future, they note how they see supply chains and the wider industry evolving over the next few years – and what businesses need to do to be future-focused.

“I do think that, looking forward, the biggest challenge for any supply chain is going to be cost,” says Fraser. “Many upfront costs are higher than ever, and cost-cutting can still cause challenges for customers. Across the industry, we need to be looking at new, sustainable components – but these industries need to become more competitive, because right now customers are the ones suffering from significant costs.

“A trend I’ve noticed is that there’s been a tremendous change in how businesses view supply chain teams. Over the next few years – in both procurement and logistics – we really need to challenge how traditional roles are viewed and the way we work.

“Businesses which can give supply chain teams access to more data are the ones that are going to be the most successful. Unless you put the effort in, it’s very easy to lose the importance of relationship building in a post-COVID-19 world. People don’t travel as much anymore, and a lot of the interactions they have with suppliers is virtual. That doesn’t help you understand how your suppliers operate – their factories, their challenges, the work they put in. Connecting with people in person and utilising the best data around you will help differentiate your business, but it requires putting in the time.”

Currently, Fraser stresses how the relationship between businesses and suppliers is shifting.

“Suppliers are changing,” says Fraser. “Just because your business spends a lot of money with a supplier, doesn’t mean they’ll accept unreliability. They don’t need to work with you anymore, especially if you’re viewed as a difficult customer. Events like COVID-19 and the blockage of the Suez Canal have created so much pressure in the supply chain that businesses need to be much smarter about how they look at product flows and work better with people. If there are going to be challenges within your business, work alongside your supplier so they understand the problem fully. You can’t be the business that cried wolf every week.”

“Touching on Fraser’s point, we need to make sure that we’re enabling the buyers from a technology standpoint to make the right decisions,” says Shiv. “So it’s all about simulating the data and displaying it in a way that makes sense. We must understand what the supplier needs to ensure we’re ahead.

“We want to enable our suppliers, but we need to understand what they expect to see from us from a digital perspective. For us, we have a three-click mentality, meaning that suppliers should be able to access anything that they need from our system in three clicks. That’s our vision for our supply base.”

As the conversation comes to a close, both Fraser and Shiv celebrate the resilience their teams and wider supply base have shown in a challenging time for the business.

“Our current supply chain and the support they have provided, especially over the last few months, has been invaluable,” says Fraser. “It’s a real testament to them and their abilities to help us transition into our next chapter. We’re doing everything to make the most of this situation and be successful, and the resilience that all of our teams have been able to show throughout the bankruptcy process has been remarkable. I think our suppliers recognise this, and vice versa.”

“We are ultimately nothing without our people,” agrees Shiv. “Our whole team is now even more motivated to see Volta be successful. The passion and energy they have, given the current uncertainty, is remarkable. I could not have wished for a better team.”

Learn more about Volta Trucks here.

ADDED VALUE

Fraser

“I’ve been listening to more podcasts recently,” says Fraser. “One of my favourites is the High Performancepodcast, and in particular a recent interview with Gordon Ramsey. Obviously, he’s in a very different field to me, but how he spoke about his career journey resonated with me. He’s built his career making sideways moves, so when it became time for him to run his own kitchen he was prepared for the various challenges. In this podcast episode, he mentions that he learned to dance in the rain – having the resilience to know that in business there’s always going to be a storm, you have to learn to dance in the rain and thrive in the situation.”

Connect with Fraser on LinkedIn.

Shiv

“I recently read Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson, which is incredibly relevant when you’re looking to build a team,” says Shiv. “She’s the former COO of Stripe, and it was really interesting to learn how she built her operating model. I have begun applying her insights in terms of my own management and leadership strategies.”

Connect with Shiv on LinkedIn.