Former Tesla Leader joins ThroughPut Inc. as Head of Product Management and Sales Engineering

January 28, 2020 · 7 minutes
By Tina
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ThroughPut Inc., the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Supply Chain pioneer that enables operations to increase output, quality, throughput, profitability, and safety through automated bottleneck elimination, today announced the appointment of Alla Anashenkova as the Head of Product Management and Sales Engineering. In this role, Alla will be responsible for overseeing the technical product roadmap and supply chain operations across all the creative, product, and technology teams and will report directly to the CEO.


The appointment marks a significant milestone for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Supply Chain pioneer as Alla is the first female executive to take up a leadership role in the fast-growing  company. Alla joins ThroughPut Inc. from Tesla, the Silicon Valley-based electric and autonomous vehicle pioneer led by global entrepreneur, Elon Musk, which recently overtook Volkswagen as the second most valuable automotive company in the world, and right on the heels of the Just-In-Time, Lean Manufacturing giant, Toyota. At Tesla, Alla spent nearly eight years navigating through supply chain nuances while scaling production over 100x. Prior to Tesla, she worked with Walmart leading project initiatives in the Transportation & Logistics segment in the then nascent Walmart.com, in order to leverage the giants existing operations, logistics and supply chain heft to take head-on the challenges emerging online from the eCommerce giant Amazon, and other budding disruptive fast-growing start-ups. Combining a unique pedigree, diverse industry experience, cross-border expertise, and the ability to thrive in fast-paced environments with a zeal to succeed, helps make Alla an excellent and uniquely qualified choice for this instrumental and status-quo challenging role. 

Today the Industrial IoT (IIoT) and Industry 4.0 are driving unprecedented disruption across all industries, with notable progress for those able to attract top-notch, leading-edge talent with unique skill-sets spanning Operations, Technology, Industrial Data Systems, Business, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Transformations, from their earliest seeds to the few proven successes thus far on the global stage. With such IIoT-led advancements, industrial processes, including traditional, linear manufacturing supply chains, are being transformed into dynamic, interconnected systems that provide executable insights with embedded domain expertise in real-time. 

Despite these advancements, however, industrial companies are still battling the most fundamental issues around data-drive, Digital Operations, including disparate siloed data systems; outdated static business intelligence tools; simple analytics; manual spreadsheets;  and even white boards and blackboards. As such, the vast majority of companies today are still not yet in a position to leverage real-time, 360-degree visibility across their operations and end-to-end supply chains. ThroughPut Inc. solves these challenges with unique capabilities inbedded in their real-time bottleneck detection, prioritization, and elimination software, ELI and ELITE. ThroughPut Supply Chain planning software enables the perfect solution for companies to process their existing data sets of any type with their existing teams to solve their existing problems – today.

In this context, Ali Raza, the CEO of ThroughPut Inc., explained, “Since the industry is already undergoing a major transition, for this critical role we were particular focused on the ability to handle complex supply chain dynamics with a strong aptitude towards using a data-oriented approach. Alla comes with the comprehensive end-to-end supply chain and operations management experience in conjunction with a valuable information systems background –  a combination that is rare in our space.” Commenting on the teams at Tesla and Walmart where Alla played key roles, Mr. Raza further explained, “Alla is also a natural leader who leads by example and is already drawing more top talent to the company. Thanks to Alla’s deep experience in handling complex global analytics at Tesla, she has all the competencies that are needed to further accelerate our product innovation at the leading edge of Industrial AI Operations. We are excited to learn from her, grow with her, and expand our core domain industrial operations and data analytics competencies together”. 

Seth Page, the COO and Head of Strategic Partnerships at ThroughPut Inc. also opined, “Due to the innate volatile nature of our industry and the rapid technological advancements and disruptions, every hire is crucial when it comes to leadership roles. We are thrilled to have Alla join us in accomplishing our vision of real-time bottleneck elimination for Supply Chain excellence and the reduction of $10 Trillion of annual global waste that could otherwise be put to better use. As the face of industrial operations is changing, this once homogeneous industry is showing more diversity than ever. Female leaders can and do make a difference by building successful products and relationships for today’s ever-changing digital supply chain for an increase in the economic and societal impact of industrial digital transformation.” Mr. Page, a member of the UPWARD Silicon Valley Chapter, advancing women leaders, further added, “As has been proven time and time again, Women create significant positive impacts on the factory floor, bringing varied perspectives to problem-solving and the strength to handle complicated on-the-ground scenarios that arise on-the-fly. Today, more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs are unfilled because companies can’t find qualified workers to fill them. Women are critical to filling these gaps. As industrial operations undergo continuous major change, advances in technology, automation and robotics have transformed how goods are produced, packaged, shipped, and returned. In the coming years, many manufacturing jobs will require even more highly-specialized technical skills, and women will play a vital role in fulfilling and leading this advanced job-skill match, where they already make up over half of all college graduates and workers in the US.” 

Bhaskar Ballapragada, CTO, further added, “In fact, research shows that most manufacturing organizations benefit immensely with gender and other diversity as it enhances the ability to innovate with a greater return-on-equity and higher profitability. As more and more women take up challenging roles, especially across industrial operations, organizations are better equipped to unleash the full potential of their female-empowered workforces by fostering a work culture where unique strengths thrive. As a fast-growing technology venture in Silicon Valley and Seattle, ThroughPut is  proud that this is our first step towards the Women In Technology initiative: to help create a diverse team with women leading from the front and managing cross-functional teams across geographies. We are confident that Alla will exceed all expectations and will take the company to greater heights with an ever-more-diverse team.”

When asked about her new role at ThroughPut Inc., Alla expressed her excitement and added, “I have always strived to channel my skills to lead and mentor teams of talented supply chain experts, plant engineers, operations managers, data scientists, and developers, empowering them to find innovative solutions to a wide variety of problems. What particularly interests me is how ThroughPut’s supply chain management software enables operations managers to seamlessly connect all industrial devices and systems, liberating processing and integrating data from the factory floor into the cloud, hybrid and on-premise systems. This makes factories more efficient, profitable, competitive, with safer and more secure operations, thus resulting in million- and even billion-dollar savings.” Alla added, “I am quite excited about taking ThroughPut’s software to the next level of differentiation to create absolute value for our partners and customers. Bottleneck elimination has always been a priority for Supply Chain SMEs and the most difficult to tackle, until ThroughPut made it possible.”. 

PR Contact

Tina Jacobs – Marketing Manager

tina.jacobs@throughput.ai

About ThroughPut Inc.

ThroughPut Inc. is the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Supply Chain pioneer that enables companies to increase output, quality and profitability through bottleneck elimination. ThroughPut’s Supply Chain AI Platform, including ELI and ELITE, is the only Bottleneck Management System (BMS) that utilizes existing enterprise databases, such as ERP, MES, IMS, TMS, WMS, PLC, EAM, POS, CRM, SCADA and other data systems, to solve the bottleneck problem across global supply chains already today. ThroughPut’s systems are designed by Fortune 500 geo-market logistics leaders and Silicon Valley analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and industrial domain experts with decades of experience each in the space. ELI thinks like an operations manager and automatically provides domain expertise, insights, and recommendations in real-time, which current static Business Intelligence and Analytics tools do not effectively capture nor calculate. ThroughPut’s dynamic insights include real-time resource allocation recommendations, granular root causes, and operational process stability analysis. ELI enables process improvement experts and operations managers to reduce cycle times and operational unpredictability across some of the most advanced process industries, including automotive, manufacturing, transportation, aerospace & aviation, chemical processing, energy, oil & gas, retail, food and agriculture, and others.

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