DENSO Spirit Spotlight: Ravi Vadapalli

Venkata Ravisankar Vadapalli (Ravi, for short), a technical lead for DENSO’s phone-as-a-key (PaaK) project, was laser focused on making the development process run effectively when the team of 15+ engineers were working remotely.

The PaaK project started in 2017 with the goal of replacing traditional car key fobs with a customer’s smartphone to start the vehicle. Pretty cool, right? 

While the first PaaK technology produced by DENSO entered the market in 2020, DENSO has continued to enhance the software. This is what Ravi’s team, BES2 (Body Electronic Systems2) Ford PaaK Team, was working on when COVID-19 hit.

Because of the work from home situation, the team was forced to use a very old tool that’s difficult to work with and slows down efficiency. Ravi oversaw switching the team to a different configuration tool, Github, to ensure they were able to deliver products on-pace and better contribute to the overall project.

This turned out to be more helpful than expected for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) customers who have dynamic change requests. Normally, timelines are very short and it can be difficult to manage (not to mention stressful for the team) if a process isn’t in place. Using Github helped streamline the process, improved response times and created happier associates. 

Thanks, Ravi and team, for not only getting creative and always putting the customer first, but living up to the DENSO Spirit that’s driven by foresight, credibility, and collaboration.